She left him waiting in the hall, while she went to make her fictional enquiries. He was as sure that they were fictional as if he had glanced into the room upstairs where Maisie was making a last anxious inspection before her mirror. So the pretense was to be that he had called casually and had scarcely been expected.
He tried to learn something of Maisie from the appearance of her hall. It was speckless. Everything in it shone with intense cleanliness and polish. He had noticed the same gleam about the windows, brasses and very doorstep before he had entered. He had noticed it again about the maid who had admitted him. It sent Maisie up very much in his estimation. It almost explained to him how she had managed to get three husbands. Men never know why they fall in love with a woman; more often than not they mistake tidiness for beauty. "If you can't be beautiful, be clean," Maisie's hall seemed to say; "if you can be both, you're invincible." Maisie was invincible, as her conquests proved. This first glimpse of her belongings showed that she loved cleanliness. By a jump in his logic Tabs began to suspect that she must be beautiful.
He had pursued his observations thus far, when he heard a door discreetly closed overhead and the starchy rustling of the maid returning.
"If your Lordship will step into the drawing-room, Madam will be down in a moment."
He found himself in a long artistic room, feminine to a degree, exquisitely restful and yet broad-minded with signs of selection and travel. It was furnished
according to no particular period. There was an Italian chest of drawers inlaid with ivory, a Dutch marquetry secrétaire, some Louis XVIth chairs, a mirror of old Venetian glass, bronzes, snuff-boxes, specimens of china, odd bits of beaten silver, knick-knacks of all sorts, lying scattered about with apparent carelessness. A fire was burning in the grate. Tea was set out on a table beside a companionable couch. Through French windows the smallest of gardens shone bravely, a-blow with bulb flowers planted in crevices of a rockery, at the foot of which lay an oval pond and a silent fountain. As though to emphasize the game of littleness, a toy-boat floated on the pond's surface.
"Not the woman I had imagined," was his unspoken thought; "not the wily adventuress! But if she's not, then what——"
In an attempt to satisfy his curiosity, he commenced to inspect the room in detail. The first thing he discovered was that all the silver frames, which stood about, contained photographs of the same man. It struck him as an odd exhibition of faithfulness on the part of a woman who had had so many husbands. He counted the photographs; there were no less than five of them, recording the same face from varying angles.
"Which of them, is he," he asked himself, "Pollock, Gervis, or Lockwood? But he mayn't be any of them. Perhaps he's a possible fourth—the latest. If so, here's hoping, for he shuts out Adair."
He turned towards the couch, intending to sit