Lord Malvin and his niece had received their guests at the head of the grand staircase. Now, when almost every one had arrived, the great scientist had withdrawn to an inner room at the end of a long series of apartments, and stood there talking with a small knot of friends.
This inner drawing-room was the culminating part of the suite, the throne room as it were; and the people standing there could look down a long and crowded vista of light and movement, while the yearning and sobbing of Kubelik's violin came to their ears in gusts and throbs of delicious sound.
Lord Malvin, a tall, upright old man with a long white beard, a high white brow beneath his velvet skull-cap, and wearing a row of orders, was talking to Sir Harold Oliver. Sir Harold was the principal of a great Northern University, a slim, hard-faced man of middle age, and the pioneer in the movement which was allowing a place to both philosophy and psychology in modern science.
A third person stood there also, a youngish man of middle height, Mr. Donald Megbie, the well-known journalist and writer on social and religious matters. Donald Megbie held rather a curious position in the literary world. He was the friend of many great people, and more often than not his pen was the vehicle chosen by them to first introduce their ideas and discoveries to the general public. When it was time to let the man in the street know of some stupendous discovery, Megbie was called in, and his articles, always brilliant and interesting, explained the matter in popular terms for the non-technical mind.
"So Gouldesbrough has not yet come?" Sir Harold Oliver said.
"Not yet," Lord Malvin answered. "I have had a telegram from him, however, to say that he is compelled to be rather later than he had expected. I have told the butler to wait in the hall for him, and to bring him straight through here directly he arrives."
"A remarkable man," said Mr. Megbie, in that low and pleasant voice which had become so familiar in high places—even in the private rooms of cabinet ministers it was said—during the last few years.
"A man none of us can afford to ignore," Sir Harold answered with a slight sigh of impatience.
Megbie smiled.
"My dear Donald," Sir Harold went on, "please don't smile in that superior sort of manner. I know what you are thinking. You're thinking 'how these scientists love one another.' You are accusing me of envy, jealousy and uncharitableness. I'm not jealous of Gouldesbrough, great as his attainments are, and I'm sure I don't envy him."