He fell into a reverie which lasted till he was disturbed by a knock at the door. "Come in," he said mechanically, and the head of Pod was thrust into the room.
"A lady to see you, sir. Says her name is Miss Deane."
"Olive Deane!" said Mr. Kelvin, in surprise. "Show her in."
Matthew Kelvin at this time was thirty-five years old. He was a handsome, large-nosed man, with full grey eyes and rather prominent teeth. He was already partially bald; but what hair he had left was carefully trimmed and parted down the middle, while his bushy dark-brown whiskers showed no traces of age. He always dressed well, and was very particular as to his boots and gloves and the cut of his trousers. He had studied the art of dress as carefully as he had studied many other things, and the result was a success.
For his inferiors and those in his employ, Mr. Kelvin had a brusque, imperious manner that was not unmixed with a sort of hard contemptuousness. For his rich clients and those above him in the social scale, he had a pleasant, smiling, dégagé style, which sat upon him so easily and naturally that it was impossible to doubt its genuineness. To such people he was a man who never seemed to have much to do beyond trimming the nails of his very white hands, and sniffing at the choice flowers in his button-hole, and now and then dashing off his signature at the foot of some document which he never seemed to be at the trouble of reading.
Yet no one ever seemed to doubt Matthew Kelvin's ability in his profession, unprofessional as he was--judged by the ordinary types of provincial lawyers--in many of his ways and doings. But, then, he was a sort of second cousin to Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, and that perhaps made some difference. Many people thought it did, for the Carstairs were a very old family; and where's the use of having good blood in one's veins unless it declares itself in some shape or other?
Mr. Kelvin was fond of hunting, and subscribed liberally to the Thorndale pack. Few faces were more familiar in the field than his, and he was always nominated as one of the stewards of the Hunt Ball. Having a good voice, and being fond of singing, it was only natural that he should be a member of the Pembridge Catch Club; besides this, he was chairman of the Literary Institute. One winter he gave a couple of lectures on "Some Recent Discoveries in Astronomy," with illustrative drawings by himself; while on more than one occasion he had treated the whole of the workhouse children to an Orrery or a Panorama, and even to that wicked place--the Circus.
Matthew Kelvin lived with his mother, in the house where he had been born. His father had been dead some twelve years when we first make his acquaintance. The business had come down from his grandfather, who had been the first Matthew Kelvin known in Pembridge.
Perhaps the finest trait in Matthew's character was his love and reverence for his mother, who had been more or less of an invalid for many years. For her sake, when she was ill, and hungered for his presence by her bedside, he would give up his most pressing engagements, and sit by the hour together reading novels to her--a class of literature to which he rarely condescended at other times.
Mrs. Kelvin, who was a sensible, clear-sighted woman enough in the ordinary affairs of life, still cherished a strange preference for the milk-and-water novels and vapid romances of the Minerva Press school, such as had been fashionable when she was a girl; and it was pleasant to see her son reading out this rubbish to her with the gravest air possible, hiding his contempt and weariness under a well-feigned interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of some book-muslin heroine, or some hero with chiselled features who was never anything less than a lord in disguise.