"Thank you, Jimmie," she said. "You are a nice boy."
After Pendleton had gone, Miss Vale sat for some moments in silence; and all the time her eyes went from one part of the room to another, curiously; she seemed to be trying to estimate the man whom she came to consult by his surroundings.
At one side, rank on rank of books ran from floor to ceiling; others were scattered about in chairs, on stands and on the floor. At one spot the wall was racked with glittering, and to her, strange looking instruments. An open door gave a glimpse of a second apartment with bare, plastered wall, fitted with tables covered with sheet lead and cluttered with tanks, grotesquely swelling retorts, burners, jars and other things that make up a complete laboratory.
But these told her nothing, except that the man was a student; and this she had heard before.
So she gave her attention to Ashton-Kirk himself. He stood by the open window, the morning light beating strongly upon his dark, keen face, apparently watching the uncouth surging in the street below.
"He's very handsome and very wealthy," her friend Connie Bayless had informed her only that morning. "Comes of a very old family; has the entrée into the most exclusive houses, but practically ignores society."
"Oh, yes, I know him," her uncle, an eminent attorney, had told her. "A very unusual young man. I might call him acutely intellectual, and he is an adept in many out of the way branches of knowledge. He would make a wonderful lawyer, but has too much imagination. Thinks more of visionary probabilities than of tangible facts."
"As an amateur actor," Pendleton had confided to her, "Kirk is without an equal. If he adopted the stage, he'd make a sensation. At college he was a most tremendous athlete too—football, cross-country running, wrestling, boxing. And I'm told that he still keeps in training. Clever chap."
"I never saw a more splendid natural equipment for languages," said Professor Hutchinson. "The most sprawling dialect seemed a simple matter to him; Greek and the oriental tongues were no more trouble in his case than the 'first reader' is to an intelligent child."
She had spoken with Mrs. Stokes-Corbin over the telephone. Mrs. Stokes-Corbin was related to Ashton-Kirk, and her information was kindly but emphatic.