An hour or so later, Katty Winslow, alone in her friend's motor, found herself before the lodge of the big lonely place where the retired money-lender—a Yorkshireman by birth—had set up his household gods. The great gates were closed and locked, but there was a bell, and she rang it.
After a certain interval the lodge-keeper came out.
"I've come to see Mr. Greville Howard," she explained, and smiled amiably at the man.
He looked at her doubtfully. "The master don't see no one excepting by appointment," he said gruffly.
"I think he'll see me."
And then an extraordinary piece of luck befell Katty Winslow. While she was standing there, parleying, she suddenly saw a man inside the park, walking towards the gates.
"I think," she said boldly, "that that is Mr. Greville Howard?" and she saw by the lodgekeeper's face that she was right in her guess.
Moving gracefully forward, she slid past him, and thus she stood just within the gates, while slowly there advanced towards her—and, had she but known it, towards many others—Fate, in the person of a tall, thin, some would have said a very distinguished-looking, elderly man.
As he came up, he looked at Katty with a measuring, thoughtful glance, and his eyes travelled beyond her to the well-appointed motor drawn up in the lonely country road outside.