“I shall follow this up,” he said to the secretary. “What can a ‘practical refutation’ mean?”
Nestle shook his head, with a smile.
“I really can’t guess, sir,” he said. “Unless it refers to the argumentum baculinum.”
Gilead mused a little.
“It says ‘immediately’,” he reflected. “I must go at once, then, or I shall be forestalled.”
He rose, and looked about him.
“Miss Halifax enters to-day, you understand,” he said, “upon her duties as my personal typewriter and amanuensis. You will see that she is made comfortable here in my absence.”
Perhaps the ghost of a smile twitched the soft-speaking secretary’s mouth, as he answered that his chief’s commands should be scrupulously obeyed.
Gilead took a cab to Raxe’s Hotel, and enquired at once for “Judex.” He seemed conscious of a twinkle in the right eye of the hall-porter who took his name, and of that of the boy who went off with it, as if some telegraphic levity had passed between them. But in a little the boy came back, with a perfectly sober face, and informed him that Mr Judex would see him. He was shown upstairs into a private sitting-room, where by a table sat a little old man, shrewd and withered, but of a very spruce appearance. His eyes were piercing black, his lips kept a perpetual chewing motion, like a crab’s, a few threads of white hair clung to the barren slopes of his scalp. But he was very neatly dressed in grey twill frock-coat and trousers, with a shepherd’s plaid bow at his neck.
