He found the laboratory exactly as the young scientist had described it, absolutely sound-proof, light-proof, and as innocent of hole or aperture in its concrete walls and floor—with the exception of the door leading from the dining-room—as the inside of an egg.
His introduction to the family—a large one—caused him to be voted an acquisition to its amusement by its younger and more frivolous members. Before he had been in the house an hour, the very sight of his gold-rimmed monocle and the sound of his inane laugh was a signal for the spoilt Digby twins, aged eight, literally to fling themselves upon him, notwithstanding the gentle protests of their meek little fair-haired governess. She had been curtly introduced as Miss Smith by his hostess, and then allowed to fade away into the obscurity she so obviously preferred.
Within the next twenty-four hours Lieutenant Deland gained much intimate knowledge as to the ways and characters of an interesting family. Fancies are queer things, and he found himself greatly disliking Colonel Digby's wife, a hard-faced, gushing woman, shrill of voice, and quick to scold, and he was not surprised to learn that she was the Colonel's second wife, and not the mother of the Captain at all. According to the gossip elicited in the servants' hall by Dollops, who had been allowed to accompany him at the last moment, the dreamy, absent-minded scientist had been snapped up by the lady, herself a widow, when on a visit to Vienna. He had found himself married "before he was properly awake," as Dollops expressed it with a significant grin.
Cleek soon found, too, that her contempt for Captain Kenneth was as great as her inordinate love for her own son by her first marriage, Max Wertz, a brilliant young scamp of the class of bar-loafers and roulette-table haunters. It did not take Cleek long, either, to discover that, unknown to the old Colonel or Kenneth, both mother and son were keenly curious as to the work carried on in the concrete laboratory.
Cleek played right up both to mother and son, however, and had the satisfaction of obtaining from both unqualified approval.
"I say, Deland, you're a good sort," said young Wertz in the drawing-room that evening—a shade too enthusiastically, perhaps—"but hang it all, if you can go into that silly old stone coffin of a laboratory, why can't I? Jealousy, that's it! Old Ken thinks he's the only one with brains in his head. What—what's it like in there, anyway?"
"Dem dark, dirty, and smelly, my boy," was the lieutenant's drawled and expressive reply. "You keep out of it, old sport. Give you my word, my clothes'll smell of rotten eggs for a week. Hullo, though, who's that coming out of it now?"
Wertz spun round and looked across at the door which led into the laboratory. "Oh, that's Brunel," he said, carelessly. "Ken's other self, alter ego, and all that sort of thing. Can't bear the man myself. I'll introduce you if you like, and then I'll go along."
He performed the ceremony carelessly enough, and then lounged away whistling the latest jazz melody.
Left alone, the two men found themselves mentally sizing each other up as men will do, and Cleek decided silently that he liked the look of Max Brunel—but not on account of his appearance. That was not very prepossessing. His face was too scarred from his student days at Heidelberg, and his clothes, which were stained, also reeked of the chemical compounds with which he, like his friend Kenneth, spent his days. But his voice was an attractive one, and his eyes, when unshaded by disfiguring glasses, were clear though undisguisedly penetrating.