A page boy opened the door in response to Leslie's ring, and, on learning her name, ushered her and her father upstairs into a room hung round with pictures, and, giving them chairs, disappeared through a door in a partition which seemed to screen off a kind of office.
Leslie's heart beat apprehensively, and her face grew paler, but Francis Lisle looked round with a kind of suppressed exultation.
"There are examples of some of our best known artists here, Leslie," he said in a voice quavering with excitement. "There's one of so-and-so's," he mentioned the name, "and that is Sir Frederick's. This Mr. Arnheim is one of the first, the first dealers in the world, and never makes a mistake. Never! He would not have sent for me unless he had seen some of my pictures, and meant taking me up, as they call it."
"Oh, do not be too buoyed up, papa," she murmured in an agony of shame and remorse. "If it should not be so, if there should be some mistake. Oh, if you had let me come alone."
"Mistake? What can you mean, Leslie?" he responded almost angrily. "There is no mistake, can be none. Anyone would think you doubted my—my ability, my artistic capacity."
"Hush, hush!" she whispered, for he had raised his voice unconsciously, and she heard footsteps approaching.
The next moment the door in the partition opened, and a short, stout man with closely cropped hair of silvery white, and small shrewd eyes, entered the room or gallery.
He bowed and looked at them keenly, and it seemed to Leslie that his glance rested longer upon her than on her father.
"Mr. Lisle?" he said.
Francis Lisle rose and held out his hand in a stately kind of way, as if he were Peter Paul Rubens receiving a deputation.