“I see,” murmured Harley, as the butler showed him into a small but well-filled library on the left of the lobby.
Refreshments were set invitingly upon a table beside a deep lounge chair. But Harley declined the man’s request to refresh himself while waiting and began aimlessly to wander about the room, apparently studying the titles of the works crowding the bookshelves. As a matter of fact, he was endeavouring to arrange certain ideas in order, and if he had been questioned on the subject it is improbable that he could have mentioned the title of one book in the library.
His mental equipment was of a character too rarely met with in the profession to which he belonged. While up to the very moment of reaching Sir Charles’s house he had doubted the reality of the menace which hung over this man, the note of danger which he had sensed at the very threshold had convinced him, where more ordinary circumstantial evidence might have left him in doubt.
It was perhaps pure imagination, but experience had taught him that it was closely allied to clairvoyance.
Now upon his musing there suddenly intruded sounds of a muffled altercation. That is to say, the speakers, who were evidently in the lobby beyond the library door, spoke in low tones, perhaps in deference to the presence of a visitor. Harley was only mildly interested, but the voices had broken his train of thought, and when presently the door opened to admit a very neat but rather grim-looking old lady he started, then looked across at her with a smile.
Some of the grimness faded from the wrinkled old face, and the housekeeper, for this her appearance proclaimed her to be, bowed in a queer Victorian fashion which suggested that a curtsy might follow. One did not follow, however. “I am sure I apologize, sir,” she said. “Benson did not tell me you had arrived.”
“That’s quite all right,” said Harley, genially.
His smile held a hint of amusement, for in the comprehensive glance which the old lady cast across the library, a glance keen to detect disorder and from which no speck of dust could hope to conceal itself, there remained a trace of that grimness which he had detected at the moment of her entrance. In short, she was still bristling from a recent encounter. So much so that detecting something sympathetic in Harley’s smile she availed herself of the presence of a badly arranged vase of flowers to linger and to air her grievances.
“Servants in these times,” she informed him, her fingers busily rearranging the blooms, “are not what servants were in my young days.”
“Unfortunately, that is so,” Harley agreed.