Inside the hallway the door on the left that led to Mrs. Garcia’s apartments opened and the young woman thrust out her head, and said in a hissing whisper:
“There’s a gentleman waiting for you in the parlor, Miss Moreau.”
At the same time Miguel imparted similar information from the top of the stairs, and the Chinaman appeared at the kitchen door and cried from thence, with the laconic dryness peculiar to his race:
“One man see you, parlor.”
Mariposa stood looking from one to the other with the raised eyebrows of inquiring astonishment. The only person who had visitors in the Garcia house was Pierpont, and they did not come at such a fashionably late hour.
“He’s a thin, consumpted-looking young man with eye-glasses,” said Mrs. Garcia, curling round the door the better to project the hissing whisper she employed, “and he said he’d wait till you came in.”
Mariposa turned toward the parlor door, leaving the family, with Barron, on the stairs, and the Chinaman, peering from the kitchen regions, watching her with tense interest, as if they half expected they would never see her again.
Two of the gases in the old chandelier were lit and cast a sickly light over the large room, which had the close, musty smell of an unaired apartment. The last relics of Señora Garcia’s grandeur were congregated here—bronzes that once had cost large sums of money, a gilt console that had been brought from a rifled French château round the Horn in a sailing ship, a buhl cabinet with its delicate silvery inlaying gleaming in the half-light, and two huge Japanese vases, with blue and white dragons crawling round their necks, flanking the fireplace.
On the edge of a chair, just under the chandelier, sat a young man. He had his hat in his hand, and his head drooped so that the light fell smoothly on the crown of blond hair. He looked small and meager in the surrounding folds of a very large and loose ulster. As the sound of the approaching step caught his ear he started and looked up, with the narrowed eyes of the near-sighted, and then jumped to his feet.
“Miss Moreau?” he said inquiringly, and extended a long, thin hand which, closing on hers, felt to her warm, soft grasp like a bunch of chilled sticks. She had not the slightest idea who he was, and looking at him under the wan light, saw he was some one from that world of wealth with which she had so few affiliations. Something about him—the coldness of his hand, an indescribable trepidation of manner—suggested to her that he was exceedingly ill at ease. She looked at him wonderingly, and said: