The light which came in from the hall, as the door was opened, showed a man servant. The man, after a respectful inquiry, switched on the light. He crossed into the adjoining room—a bedroom; the room where Alan was, he thought, must be a dressing room, and there was a bath between. Presently the man reappeared, and moved softly about the room, unpacking Alan's suitcase. He hung Alan's other suit in the closet on hangers; he put the linen, except for one shirt, in the dresser drawers, and he put Alan's few toilet things with the ivory-backed brushes and comb and other articles on the dressing stand.
Alan watched him queerly; no one except himself ever had unpacked Alan's suitcase before; the first time he had gone away to college—it was a brand new suitcase then—"mother" had packed it; after that first time, Alan had packed and unpacked it. It gave him an odd feeling now to see some one else unpacking his things. The man, having finished and taken everything out, continued to look in the suitcase for something else.
"I beg pardon, sir," he said finally, "but I cannot find your buttons."
"I've got them on," Alan said. He took them out and gave them to the valet with a smile; it was good to have something to smile at, if it was only the realization that he never had thought before of any one's having more than one set of buttons for ordinary shirts. Alan wondered, with a sort of trepidation, whether the man would expect to stay and help him dress; but he only put the buttons in the clean shirt and reopened the dresser drawers and laid out a change of things.
"Is there anything else, sir?" he asked.
"Nothing, thank you," Alan said.
"I was to tell you, sir, Mr. Sherrill is sorry he cannot be at home to dinner to-night. Mrs. Sherrill and Miss Sherrill will be here. Dinner is at seven, sir."
Alan dressed slowly, after the man had gone; and at one minute before seven he went down-stairs.
There was no one in the lower hall and, after an instant of irresolution and a glance into the empty drawing-room, he turned into the small room at the opposite side of the hall. A handsome, stately, rather large woman, whom he found there, introduced herself to him formally as Mrs. Sherrill.
He knew from Sherrill's mention of the year of their marriage that Mrs. Sherrill's age must be about forty-five, but if he had not known this, he would have thought her ten years younger. In her dark eyes and her carefully dressed, coal-black hair, and in the contour of her youthful looking, handsome face, he could not find any such pronounced resemblance to her daughter as he had seen in Lawrence Sherrill. Her reserved, yet almost too casual acceptance of Alan's presence, told him that she knew all the particulars about himself which Sherrill had been able to give; and as Constance came down the stairs and joined them half a minute later, Alan was certain that she also knew.