In the outer world Mr. Mowll was the right-hand man of Gabriel Cassilis, his factotum, and the man, according to some, by whose advice he walked. Gabriel Cassilis walked by no man's advice save his own.
"For you, Mowll," said his employer briefly. "These I will attend to. Telegraph to—wherever his address is—to the man Wylie—the writing man"—newspaper people and writers of articles were "writing men" to Gabriel Cassilis—"I want him at once."
Then he absorbed himself again in his papers.
When he was left alone he pulled some printed documents out of a drawer, and compared them with letters which had the New York post-mark upon them. He read carefully, and made notes at various points with a stump of a blue crayon pencil. And he was still engaged on them when, half an hour later, his secretary asked him through a tube whether he would see Mr. Wylie.
Mr. Wylie was an elderly man—a man of sixty—and he was a man on whose face many years of rum-and-water were beginning to tell. He was a man of letters, as he said himself; he had some kind of name, in virtue of certain good things he had written, in his early manhood, before the rum-and-water period set in. Now he went up and down, doing odd jobs of literary work, such as are always wanting some one to do them in this great city. He was a kind of literary cab.
"You are free to-day, Mr. Wylie?"
"I am, Mr. Cassilis."
"Good. Do you remember last year writing a short political pamphlet—I think at my suggestion—on the prospects of Patagonian bond-holders?"
"You gave me all the information, you know."
"That is, you found the papers in my outer office, to which all the world has access, and on them you based your opinion."