But with her little air of sad obstinacy she continued:
“If we hadn’t, we should have seen from the first that that man was a cold fool. You see it the moment you look for it. Yes, get Miss Lascarides! That’s what you’ve got to do.”
And when Robert Grimshaw held out his hand to her she raised her own with a little gesture of abstention.
“Go to-night and ask Ellida if she will lend us her sister, to put us all straight.”
Eating the end of his meal—which he had begun at the Langhams’—with young Held alone in the dining-room, Robert Grimshaw said:
“We’re going to call Miss Lascarides to the rescue.”
The lean boy’s dark eyes lit up with a huge delight.
“How exactly the right thing!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard of her. She’s a great professional reputation. You wouldn’t think there was a whole world of us talking about each other, but there is, and you couldn’t do better. How did you come to hear of her?” And then his face fell. “Of course it means my going out of it,” he said.
Robert Grimshaw let his commiserating glance rest on the young man’s open countenance, over which every emotion passed as openly and as visibly as gusts of wind pass over still waters. Suddenly an expression of timid appeal came into the swarthy face.
“I should like you to let me say,” the boy brought out, “how much I appreciate the way you’ve all treated me. I mean, you know, exactly as an equal. For instance, you talked to me just as if I were anybody else. And Mrs. Leicester!”