style="font-size:15px;"> “Strange-looking customer!” he thought.
Sibley himself was a particularly immaculate person. Being somewhat of the Latin type, black eyed and olive skinned, he was shamefacedly afraid of looking picturesque. He dressed, therefore, as precisely as a fashion-plate. The man who had got out of the lift might have bought his clothes at a junk-shop, and a foreign junk-shop at that. They were not clothes a gentleman could wear – yet Sibley received a swift impression that a gentleman was wearing them at that moment: a remarkably tall fellow, so thin that his bones looked somehow too big for him.
He walked past Sibley with no more than a glance, yet it was partly the glance which impelled Sibley to stop short and gaze at the back of a badly made tweed coat, the worst sort of a “reach-me-down” coat.
The quick mind of the publisher was addicted to similes. (He had once written a book himself, under a nom de guerre. It had failed.) The thought sprang to his mind that the glance was like the sudden opening of a dingy box, which let out a flash of secret jewels.
In spite of his shocking clothes, the man had the air and bearing of a soldier. Sibley noticed this, in criticizing the straight back, and it aroused his curiosity more than ever in connection with the scarred face.
Any one who got out at the tenth floor of the Sibley building must want to see Eversedge Sibley or one of his partners, so evidently this person intended to ask for some member of the firm. He looked the last man on earth to be a budding author; yet Eversedge Sibley had caught sight of a paper-wrapped roll of manuscript. One who was not of the publishing or editorial world might have mistaken it for something else; but no manuscript would disguise itself from eyes so trained to fear and avoid it.
“Looks more like a heavy-weight champion invalided after a desperate scrap, than a writer; or like Samson betrayed by Delilah,” thought Sibley, rather pleased with the fancy.
He put out his hand to touch the bell for the lift to come up again, but did not touch it. Instead, he turned and walked back along the marble-walled corridor to the door of the reception room. The tall man had just arrived and was talking to a wisp of a creature facetiously known in the office as “the chucker out.”
“Mr. Sibley has gone, sir,” little McNutt was insisting, with dignity. “He doesn’t generally receive strangers. Mr. Elliot is in, though, and might see you if you could wait – ”
As he spoke, McNutt caught sight of his “boss” at the door, and by looking up a pair of thick gray eyebrows, he made a distressful signal of warning. It would be awkward for Mr. Sibley to be trapped and buttonholed here, just as he had been officially described as out. McNutt could not remember the boss ever coming back after he had gone for the day, and appearing in the publicity of the reception room. If he had forgotten something, why didn’t he let himself in at the door of his own private office, which was only a little further along the hall? But, there he was, and must be protected.
“Who is Mr. Elliot?” enquired the stranger.
Eversedge Sibley spent a short holiday in England every summer, and knew that the vilely dressed man had the accent of the British upper classes. His curiosity grew with what it fed on.
“Mr. Elliot is the third partner in the firm,” explained McNutt, to whom such ignorance appeared disgraceful.
“Thank you, I’d rather wait until to-morrow and try to see Mr. Sibley himself,” said Denin.
“I am Mr. Sibley,” the publisher confessed, on one of his irresistible impulses. “I’ve just come back for something forgotten. I can give you a few minutes if you like.”
The man’s face lit. It could never have been anything but plain, almost ugly, even before the scars came; yet it was singularly arresting. “That’s very good of you,” he said.
Sibley ushered the odd visitor into his own private office, but before he could even be invited to sit down, Denin got to his errand.
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