The instrument crashed to the floor and was still; Inez flung herself on the sofa and buried her face in her arms.
CHAPTER III.
The Victory Finance Company
The morning after Sir Garth’s confession to Hessel, the cause of it, Major-General Sir Hunter Lorne, K.C.B., D.S.O., stepped from his car outside Ald House in Fenchurch Street, greeted the hall-porter cheerfully, refused the lift (“must keep young, you know, Canting”) and climbed briskly up to the offices of the Victory Finance Company on the fourth floor.
The General was a well-built man of about five foot ten, very erect and extremely good-looking, with a straight nose, firm chin, brushed-up moustache, and dark hair only powdered with grey. There was nothing subtle about him; it was quite obvious that he would be an extremely good friend to people whom he liked and frankly contemptuous of those he did not understand. He had done well in command of a division in France (or, what was considered the same thing, the division which he commanded had done well) and was now confidently engaging in a campaign in which he would be even more dependent on the skill of those serving under him.
The offices of this young and promising Finance Company were by no means pretentious. They consisted of a clerks’ room, opening on to the landing, a small room for the manager and secretary, and a larger directors’ room, which also had a door opening on to the stairs.
Sir Hunter, as was his habit, entered by way of the clerks’ room, greeted the two young clerks, asking one about his mother’s neuritis and the other about the fortunes of his pet football club (“Always get to know your men and their interests, my lad”), and passed down the short passage into the directors’ room. Here he found a fellow-director, Captain James Wraile, a clean-cut, clean-shaven man of forty, with the very pale blue eyes that may mean the extremity of either strength or weakness and are so very hard to judge.
“Morning, Wraile, my boy. Glad you’ve turned up,” exclaimed the General heartily. “How goes the world?”
Wraile smiled quietly.
“Well enough, I think, General, if you aren’t in British Cereals.”
“Ah, yes, we did well not to touch that. Your advice, I think, Wraile. I don’t know what we should do without you.”