In fact, Nicky suggested that if the finger of Providence was ever to be seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here.
A bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. It was one of the perfections of Nicky's house that it had no jarring noises in it.
"That's he," said Nicky solemnly. "Excuse me."
And he went out.
He came back, all glowing and quivering, behind Miss Bickersteth and Mr. Hugh Brodrick.
Miss Bickersteth they all knew, said Nicky. His voice was unsteady with his overmastering sense of great presences, of Jane Holland, of Tanqueray, of Brodrick.
Brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect from the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes. They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze, which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his interest. As he entered they were fixed on Jane, turning straight to her in her corner.
This directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. But Nicky, as the fervent adorer of Miss Holland, had brought to the ceremony of introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate. It was wonderful how in spite of Brodrick he got it all in.
Brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. Yet what struck Jane first in Brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his positive timidity. There was something about him that appealed to her, pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor of the "Morning Telegraph." She would have said that he was new to any business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick toward Jane.
"Do you often come over to Wendover?" he said.