Kindly and clumsy—Clarence Spalding-Wentworth had title to those two adjectives: there was no denying that. It was his kindliness that moved him, after a busy day at a metropolitan golf tournament, toward Orson Vane's house. He had heard stories of Vane's illness; they had been at college together; he wanted to see him, to have a chat, a smoke, a good, chummy hour or two.
It was his clumsiness that brought about the incident that came to have such memorable consequences. Nevins told him Mr. Vane was out; Wentworth thought he would go in and have a look at Vane's rooms, anyway; sit down, perhaps, and write him a note. Nevins had swung the curtain to behind him when Wentworth's heel caught in the wrapping around the new mirror.
He looked into the pool of glass blankly.
"Funny thing to cover up a mirror like that!" he told himself. He flung the stuff over the frame carelessly. It merely hung by a thread. Almost any passing wind would be sure to lift it off.
"Wonder where he keeps his smokes?" he hummed to himself, striding up and down, like a good natured mammoth.
He found some cigars began puffing at one with an audible satisfaction, and at last let himself down to an ebony escritoire that he could have smashed with one hand. He wrote a scrawl; waited again, whistled, looked out of the window, picked up a book, peered at the pictures, and then, with a puff of regret, strode out.
As he passed the Professor's mirror the current of air he made swept the curtain from the glass and left it exposed.
CHAPTER X.
At about the time that Wentworth was scrawling his note in Vane's rooms a slender young woman, dressed in a grey that shimmered like the winter-sea in sunlight, wearing a hat that had the air of having lit upon her hair for the moment only,—merely to give the world an instant's glance at the gracious combination that woman's beauty and man's millinery could effect—was coming out from one of those huge bazaars where you can buy almost everything in the world except the things you want. As she reached the doors, a young man, entering, brushed her arm; his sleeve caught her portemonnaie. He stooped for it, offered it hastily, and then—and not until then, gave a little "Oh!" of—what was it, joy? or mere wonder, or both?