Neither again referred to the subject during the evening, but when Parkinson came to the library a couple of hours after midnight to know whether he would be required again, he found his master rather deeply immersed in a book and a gap on the shelf where “The Flame beyond the Dome” had formerly stood.
It is not impossible that Mr Carlyle supplemented his brief note of introduction with a more detailed communication that reached his niece by the ordinary postal service at an earlier hour than the other. At all events, when Mr Carrados presented himself at the toy villa on the following afternoon he found Elsie Bellmark suspiciously disposed to accept him and his rather gratuitous intervention among her suburban troubles as a matter of course.
When the car drew up at the bright green wooden gate of Fountain Cottage another visitor, apparently a good-class working man, was standing on the path of the trim front garden, lingering over a reluctant departure. Carrados took sufficient time in alighting to allow the man to pass through the gate before he himself entered. The last exchange of sentences reached his ear.
“I’m sure, marm, you won’t find anyone to do the work at less.”
“I can quite believe that,” replied a very fair young lady who stood nearer the house, “but, you see, we do all the gardening ourselves, thank you.”
Carrados made himself known and was taken into the daintily pretty drawing-room that opened on to the lawn behind the house.
“I do not need to ask if you are Mrs Bellmark,” he had declared.
“I have Uncle Louis’s voice?” she divined readily.
“The niece of his voice, so to speak,” he admitted. “Voices mean a great deal to me, Mrs Bellmark.”
“In recognizing and identifying people?” she suggested.