It was barely half past seven when he reached the corridor, and he realized, with some slight impatience that he had a wait of nearly fifteen minutes before the limousine he had ordered from the garage would put in an appearance.
Taking out his case, he extracted a thick Egyptian cigarette, and lighted it. As he tossed the match aside, and took a first deep whiff of smoke, he had the curious, instinctive feeling that some one was looking at him.
Slowly, leisurely, without any appearance of premeditation, he turned, as if to stroll down the corridor, and found that his intuition had not been at fault.
Standing perhaps twenty feet away, in an attitude which indicated he had been merely passing toward the elevator when something arrested his attention, was a tall, rather elderly man in faultless evening dress. He wore a top hat, and carried a heavy, fur-lined coat over one arm.
But Barry barely noticed those details. He was occupied with the handsome, distinguished face, smooth shaven, and with a subtle touch of intellectual power in the brilliant dark eyes. Those eyes were fixed upon the Harvard man with an expression at once so surprised and puzzled that, in a flash, Lawrence was reminded of the look on Mrs. Winslow Courtney's high-bred face the day before.
And then—the parallel was amazingly like—a quick, genial smile flashed into the stranger's face; he bowed pleasantly, hesitated a second, as if tempted to cross the intervening space to Barry's side, then resumed his progress across the corridor and disappeared.
"Well, I'll be hanged!" Lawrence muttered, in a tone of whimsical annoyance. Though taken by surprise, he had returned the older man's salutation promptly. "Reckon I must have a double floating around town, or else people like my looks a lot more than they used to."
After a moment's hesitation, he crossed to the desk, and, giving a brief description of the elderly gentleman, asked one of the clerks who he was.
"I think you must mean Mr. Grafton Fahnstock," the latter returned promptly. "He passed through the lobby a moment ago."
Barry thanked him, and walked away, puffing meditatively on his cigarette. Presently he smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. Grafton Fahnstock was the famous cabinet minister, who had just returned from a diplomatic conference at the Hague.