wives or sweethearts, whose little high-heeled shoes made a sharp tap-a-tap against the pavement. Lamps were lighted. The reluctant twilight was gradually fading; the sunset still glowed faintly above clustered chimney-pots to the west. "I'm going to meet Terry," he told himself. "If the day had worked out as I'd planned, I should be going to ask for her hand in marriage—— When I planned that, I still believed that I was young."
Then he thought forward. Sir Tobias, from the moment he entered, would be scheming to get him to himself. Sir Tobias must be avoided. Directly dinner was ended, he would try to hurry him off and imprison him in his library to discuss this Maisie woman and Adair. Still he was going to see Terry; merely to see her was a compensation which stirred his blood.
He crossed the Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his coat and hat with the velvet-plush manner of a fashionable surgeon feeling a patient's pulse.
"If you will come this way, Sir Tobias is waiting for your Lordship in the library."
It was happening precisely as he had foreseen; it was being taken for granted that he had come as her father's friend, and therefore in some absurd measure as his contemporary.
As he prepared to follow, his attention was at
tracted by the scarlet band and gold braid about an officer's cap which was lying carelessly on the hall-table beside a pair of dog-skin gloves.
V
Sir Tobias was standing astride the hearth-rug with his back towards the fire. As the door opened, he was caught in a last nervous adjustment of his tie.
He was a little man, inclined to be podgy, brimful of a darting kind of energy and dignified with an air of fussy distinction which none of his antics, however grotesque, could diminish. He was Shakespeare as he might have appeared at sixty, after years and a return to Ann Hathaway had quenched the taller flames of his poetic fire. The resemblance was haunting and remarkable: there underlay it a hint of gnome-like agility. One suspected that he affected age as a disguise. The pointed beard was white; the scanty hair had receded from the calm forehead; the eyes were blue and faded, and red about the rims with over-much study. The top part of the face above the cheek-bones was noble; but the lower part fell away to a mouth and chin which were amiable and undecided. At the hour of Tabs' arrival, he was flinging up his hands and spluttering impotently, an inexpert swimmer in the waters of adversity.