“No-o, sir. But——”
“He is very busy. He seldom sees anybody save by appointment. Are—are you acquainted with him?”
“No, sir. But my business is important.”
“To you, perhaps,” said the clerk, with a sneering smile. “But if it isn’t important to him I shall catch it for letting you in. What is it?”
“It is business that I can tell to nobody except Mr. Grimes. Not in detail. But I can say this much: It concerns a time when Mr. Grimes was in business with another man—sixteen years or more ago and I have come—come from his old partner.”
“Humph!” said the clerk. “A begging interview? For, if so, take my advice—don’t try it. It would be no use. Mr. Grimes never gives anything away. He wouldn’t even bait a rat-trap with cheese-parings.”
“I have not come here to beg money of Mr. Grimes,” said Helen, drawing herself up.
“Well, you can come in and wait. Perhaps he’ll see you.”
This had all been said very low in the public hall, the clerk holding the door jealously shut behind him. Now he opened it slowly and let her enter a large room, with old and dusty furniture set about it, and the clerk’s own desk far back, by another door—which latter he guarded against all intrusion. Behind that door, of course, was the man she had come to see.
But as Helen turned to take a seat on the couch which the clerk indicated with a gesture of his pen, she suddenly discovered that she was not the only person waiting in the room. In a decrepit armchair by one of the front windows, and reading the morning paper, with his wig pushed back upon his bald brow, was the queer old gentleman with whom she had ridden across the continent when she had come to New York.