“Thank you, Clement,” he said. “I think I will go round.”
He did not hesitate; he did not pause a moment to question the immutability of his faith; there and then he went forth and walked direct to his destination. The little maid at the door admitted him, smiling but abashed. She remembered, if he did not, the contretemps with the lift-porter a few nights earlier. A consciousness of concern, moreover, as to the meaning of this visit repeated at an inopportune moment, fluttered, no doubt, the heart under her spruce bib. She introduced him into the drawing-room in a scarce audible voice, and shut the door upon him hurriedly.
Gilead, parcel in hand, walked across the room, a stiff little smile on his lips. Both the secretary and the amanuensis were present before him, as he had expected to find them. The girl stood with her right arm resting on the piano-top, as if for support. Her face was very white; but she neither moved nor spoke. The man stood back, as if slunk into the shadow of the window curtains. He was by far the more dumbfoundered of the two.
“I was told I might find you both here,” said Gilead quietly, “and I accept the occasion gladly for a little private talk. I have been away these two or three days on a wild-goose chase, Miss Halifax. After whom, do you suppose? Why, an old friend of yours with an odd name. Perhaps it is right—stop me if you object—that Herbert should be made acquainted at last with the circumstances of that iniquitous persecution. Do you recall that late occasion in the office, when I spoke of an advertisement which you had overlooked?”
“I had not overlooked it, Mr Balm.”
She spoke in a steady toneless voice.
“Not?” said Gilead, with a faint effort at surprise; but his lips twitched.
“No,” she said. “Only I had not wished to call your attention to it—naturally.”
“That was wrong,” he answered, “however generously your reticence was designed to spare me; still, as it happens, the quest was a fruitless one. The advertiser was not the person I sought; and so we remain as far as ever from a solution of that problem. Yet the coincidence of the name was so strange a one as to seem to justify me in the pursuit. And, after all, it appears that he adopted it from a newspaper story which he once chanced to observe in the hands of a young lady sitting next him in the train.”
“Of mine,” said Miss Halifax, in the same unlifted voice. “So that is how it happened, is it?”