They hailed a hansom and got into it together. As they drove along the crowded streets in eager conversation, a young man, passing along on foot, glanced at their faces, started, and gazed eagerly at Gavrolles. The gaze only occupied a moment, then the vehicle was gone.
The young man was Edgar Sutherland, strolling along to his club.
‘That face!’ he muttered to himself, standing and looking after the hansom. ‘Where have I seen it before? Is it possible? Good heavens, now I remember! Can it be indeed the same?’
Lost in thought, with set lips and knitted brow, he walked on to his destination.
CHAPTER XXIII.—AT THE CLUB.
James Forster, of the great City firm of Forster and Forster, found himself at the early age of thirty-five a rich and prosperous man, with plenty of leisure and a simple taste for imaginative literature and the fine arts. He was a widower, his wife having died ten years previously in the first year of their marriage, leaving him an only son; and his fine mansion in Cromwell Road, South Kensington, was presided over by his spinster sister Margaret, his elder by some five years.
The cares of business sat lightly on this good man’s shoulders, and he could at any moment have retired with a large independence; but early habits and inclination kept him to the office, long after his daily presence there was unnecessary, and he wished to remain there until his son was old enough to take his place. His office hours, however, were very short, and when they were over he assiduously cultivated the society of painters and men of letters. Many a struggling artist had cause to bless his liberality. The walls of his house were decorated with some of the finest paintings of the period; and he loved nothing better than to add to his collection by discovering genius, and paying liberally for its works, long before the trumpet of fame had given those works a price in the market.
Although himself a strict man of business, he loved Bohemian society and Bohemian ways, always holding good-humouredly that it was the prerogative of artists and authors to play pranks denied to plain men like himself. His admiration for genius was quite simple and boy-like. In certain departments of literature, particularly in that of early English poetry, he had an almost special knowledge, gained in the course of his acquisition of a fine old-fashioned library; and nothing delighted him more than to communicate informally to the ‘Megatherium’ or to ‘Notes and Queries’ occasional notes and correspondence on the pet subjects of his study.