"And the salary? Would two hundred a year do?"
"Yes," after a slight pause, "I could make it do. I should want one half-day holiday—from one o'clock—every week; and Sundays—and three weeks' holiday in the summer, and one at Christmas, and of course, the usual Bank Holidays."
"I see!" Kelson said thoughtfully; "you want plenty of time for amusement. Well! I will speak about it to Mr. Hamar, and if you leave me your address I will give it him. How nicely you keep your hands."
"I manicure them every day," Lilian Rosenberg said; then looking up at him from under the long lashes which swept her cheeks, she added, "You won't forget to tell Mr. Hamar about me, will you? I am very anxious to get a post. You don't know what it is to be hard up, do you?"
The earnest, pleading expression in her long, dark eyes appealed to Kelson as nothing else had ever appealed to him. Since his arrival in London, he had seen many pretty faces, many beautiful eyes, but assuredly none so lovely as these. And what features! what teeth! what lips! what a chin! what a figure! It seemed to him that she was not like an ordinary girl, that she was not of the same composition as any of the girls he had ever met; that she was something hardly human—something elfish, something generated by the beautiful English woods and glades, filled with the soft glamour of the moon and stars. And all the while he was thinking thus, his heart rising in rebellion against the words of Hamar, the girl continued gazing up at him, and toying with the rings on her slender, milk-white fingers.
At last he dare look at her no longer, but stammering out his promise to do all he could to get her the vacant post, he pressed her hand gently, and bade her good morning.
Then he returned to his chair, and, leaning back in it, was seeing once again in his mind's eye the fair face of the girl who had just left him, when there was a rap at the door, and the commissionaire announced Miss Martin.
"Another of them," Kelson said to himself. "And about as pretty in her way as the last. Now I wonder what she wants." He looked closely at her, but no past rose up before him—as far as this client was concerned his power of divination in that direction was nil—she was a blank.
"I've come to ask you the meaning of a dream I had last night," she began, inwardly shuddering at the sight of so much pomade and jewellery.
"Yes," he said with an encouraging smile, "what was it?"