The Englishman sat tapping the top of his shoe with his stick for some moments after Cuyler had left, then rose abruptly, left the building, and hailing a hansom, drove down town to Mr. Creighton’s office in the Equitable Building. The elevator shot him up to the fifth floor, and after losing his way in the vast corridors several times, he was finally steered to his quarry.
A boy who sat by a table in the private hall-way reading the sporting extra of an evening newspaper, took in his card. Mr. Creighton saw him at once. The room into which the Duke was shown was large, simply furnished, and flooded with light. The walls seemed to be all windows. The roar of Broadway came faintly up. A telegraph machine in the corner ticked intermittently, and slipped forth its coils of clean white ticking, so flimsy and so portentous. From an inner office came the sound of a type-writer.
Mr. Creighton rose and shook hands with his visitor, then closed the door leading into the next room and resumed his seat by a big desk covered with correspondence. He had a smooth-shaven determined face that had once been very good-looking, but there were bags under the anxious eyes, and his cheeks were haggard and lined.
“He is a man of few words—probably because his wife is a woman of so many,” thought the Duke. “I suppose I shall have to begin.”
He was not a man of many words himself.
“I have come down here,” he said, “because it seems impossible to find you at your house, and it is necessary that I should speak to you on a matter that concerns us both. I came to America to ask your daughter to marry me.”
“Have you done so?”
“I have.”
“Has she accepted you?”
“Of course she wishes to refer the matter to you.”