For hours Sir Robert would lie and gaze at the portrait that seemed to gaze back at him with proud, tragic, inscrutable dark eyes. He was gazing at it now, and might or might not have been listening as Perkins conscientiously read aloud column after column from “The Times.” Perkins read remarkably well—Sir Robert occasionally complimented him—but he often wondered whether his master really did listen!
He paused when the butler entered with a visiting card, on which a brief message was written in pencil below the name: “Entreating five minutes’ interview on a most urgent and private matter.”
“Mr. Austin Starr,” Sir Robert muttered, frowning meditatively over the card.
“There’s a lady too, Sir Robert,” said Jenkins. “I asked her name, but the gentleman said she would only give it to you.”
For a full minute Sir Robert pondered, holding the card in his thin fingers, before he answered slowly: “Very well. Bring them up, Jenkins.... You can wait in the next room, Perkins.”
In the interval he looked up again at the portrait, with a strange expression in his haggard eyes, as if he were mutely questioning it; but his stern old face was impassive as a mask as he turned it towards his visitors.
“I remember you, Mr. Starr; but who is this lady?”
Grace, for it was she, came forward and raised her veil.
“I am Roger Carling’s wife, Sir Robert.”
He looked at her intently. He had seen her once or twice, when she had been a guest at his wife’s receptions, and he never forgot a face he had once seen, but he could scarcely recognize in this pale, worn woman with appealing, pathetic, grey eyes, the radiant young girl of such a few months ago.