"I shall come back on Wednesday," the banker explained to him, before entering the train. "On Thursday I shall not be at the office. It's a day on which I never leave my wife. Though I often have to go abroad and leave her behind, I always manage it so that we may have that particular day together. I shall see you then on Friday."
He saw him, however, on Thursday, since Mr. Phips willed it so. At least, it was Mr. Phips who willed it, as far as Tom ever knew. About three on that day he came to Tom with a brief-case stuffed with documents.
"The Chief may want to run his eyes over these before he comes to the office to-morrow. Ask for himself. Don't leave them with anybody else."
To the best of Tom's belief there was no staging of what happened next beyond that which was set by Phips's intuitions.
By the time he rang at the house in Fifth Avenue it was a little after four. Admitted to the big dim hall, he heard a hum of voices coming from the sitting room. In Dadd's manner there was some constraint.
"Will you step in here, sir, and I'll tell the master that you've come?"
The library was on the same side of the house as the dining room, but it got the afternoon sun. The sun woke its colors to a burnished softness in which red and blue and green and gold melted into each other lovingly. A still, well-ordered room, little used by anyone, it gave the impression of a place of rest for ancient beauty and high thought. Rich and reposeful, there was nothing in it that was not a masterpiece, but a masterpiece which there was no one but some chance visitor to care anything about. In the four who made up the Whitelaw family there were too many aching human cares for knowledge or art to comfort.
Tom's eyes studied absently the profile of a woman on an easel. She might have been a Botticelli; he didn't know. She only reminded him of Hildred—neatly piled dark hair, long slanting eyes, a small snub nose, and lips deliciously moqueur. The colors she wore were also Hildred's, subdued and yet ardent, umber round the shoulders, with a chain of emeralds that almost sparkled in the westering light.
Whitelaw entered with his quick and eager tread, his quick and eager seizing of the young man's hand. Again the left hand rested on his shoulder; again there was the deep and earnest searching of the eyes, as if a lost secret had not yet been found; again there was the little weary push.