Chapter Two.
The Second Guardian.
“That!” to which Mrs Dunn alluded was a double knock at the front door; a few minutes later the maid ushered in a tall broad-shouldered man of about forty. His hair was thin upon the crown, but crisp and grizzled, and its spareness seemed due to the fact that nature required so much stuff to keep up the supply for his tremendous dark beard that his head ran short. It was one of those great beards that are supposed to go with the portrait of some old patriarch, and over this could be seen a pair of beautiful large clear eyes that wore a thoughtful dreamy aspect, and a broad high white forehead. He was rather shabbily dressed in a pepper-and-salt frock-coat, vest, and trousers, one of which had been turned up as if to keep it out of the mud while the other was turned down; and both were extremely baggy and worn about the knees. Judging from appearances his frock-coat might have been brushed the week before last, but it was doubtful, though his hat, which he placed upon the table as he entered, certainly had been brushed very lately, but the wrong way.
He did not wear gloves upon his hands, but in his trousers pockets, from which he pulled them to throw them in his hat, after he had carefully placed two great folio volumes, each minus one cover, upon a chair, and then he shook hands, smiling blandly, with Mrs Dunn, and with the lawyer.
“Bless the man!” said Mrs Dunn to herself, “one feels as if one couldn’t be cross with him; and there’s a button off the wrist-band of his shirt.”
“’Fraid you had not received my telegram, sir,” said the lawyer in rather a contemptuous tone, for Mrs Dunn had annoyed him, and he wanted to wreak his irritation upon someone else.
“Telegram?” said the professor dreamily. “Oh, yes. It was forwarded to me from Oxford. I was in town.”
“Oh! In town?”
“Yes. At an hotel in Craven Street. I am making preparations, you know, for my trip.”