“You didn’t expect a call on a Sunday? Fact is, I’m out of a job. I wanted to go down to the country, as usual, but there’s some grand concert or other that Leila was booked for this afternoon; and a dinner tonight at Alstrop’s. So I dropped in to pass the time of day. What is there to do on a Sunday afternoon, anyhow?”
There he was, the same old usual Hayley, as much put to it as the merest fribble of his set to employ an hour unfilled by poker! I was glad he viewed me as a possible alternative, and laughingly told him so. He laughed too—we were on terms of brotherly equality—and told me to go ahead and read two or three notes which had arrived in my absence. “Gad—how they shower down on a fellow at your age!” he chuckled.
I broke the seals and was glancing through the letters when I heard an exclamation at my back.
“By Jove—there he is!” Hayley Delane shouted. I turned to see what he meant.
He had taken up a book—an unusual gesture, but it lay at his elbow, and I suppose he had squeezed the newspapers dry. He held the volume out to me without speaking, his forefinger resting on the open page; his swarthy face was in a glow, his hand shook a little. The page to which his finger pointed bore the steel engraving of a man’s portrait.
“It’s him to the life—I’d know those old clothes of his again anywhere,” Delane exulted, jumping up from his seat.
I took the book and stared first at the portrait and then at my friend.
“Your pal in Washington?”
He nodded excitedly. “That chap I’ve often told you about—yes!” I shall never forget the way his smile flew out and reached the dimple. There seemed a network of them spangling his happy face. His eyes had grown absent, as if gazing down invisible vistas. At length they travelled back to me.
“How on earth did the old boy get his portrait in a book? Has somebody been writing something about him?” His sluggish curiosity awakened, he stretched his hand for the volume. But I held it back.