and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.
This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was conscious of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to unpack them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel after another and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa beside him. He did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he had ever seen carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.
Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of his tongue—but he did not utter these words. After circling idly, hands in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he invented something which it seemed better for him to say.
“I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things,” he remarked, casually. “My man has been buying them today—and I don't know what he mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray or was stolen at some station or other—the first part of the week—I think it must have been Leeds.”
“Yes, sir,” said Pangbourn, without emotion. “They're very careless, sir.”
He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging the razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to foresee everything—for there was not an instant's hesitation in the clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set the patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up, sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been fashioned expressly for them.
Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now he would be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind. Conceivably he might even get this identical Pangbourn—treasure though he were. Money could command everything on this broad globe—and why not Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became apparent that the man's task was nearing completion—and then frowned at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the end of a visit.
“Will you dress now, sir?” asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.
“Eh?” said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's thought.
“Shall you require me any further, sir?” the man reframed the question, deferentially.
“Oh! Oh—no,” replied Thorpe. “No—I'll get along all right.”
Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing. The candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror presented a somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he was used to—but upon second thought he preferred this restrained aristocratic glimmer.
He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with his shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait for someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before he could answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and firelight that it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward to meet his host who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a cigarette.
“Have they looked after you all right?” said Plowden, nonchalantly. “Have a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never will keep matches in a bedroom.”
He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. “I thought I'd tell you before we went down”—he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the mantel, looked down at his handsome head—“my sister has a couple of ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on shipboard a Miss Madden—an American, you know—very tall and fine, with bright red hair—rather remarkable hair it was?”
“I remember the lady,” said Thorpe, upon reflection, “but we didn't meet.” He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those days it by no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to him to know them.
Lord Plowden smiled a little. “Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun—if she's in the mood. My mother and sister—I had them call on her in London last spring—and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no end of money, you know—at least a million and a half—dollars, unfortunately. Her parents were Irish—her father made his pile in the waggon business, I believe—but she's as American as if they'd crossed over in—what was it, the 'Sunflower'?—no, the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous country for assimilation, that America is! You remember what I told you—it's put such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you were English.”
Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence. This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was not altogether grateful to his ears.
“The other one,” continued Plowden, “is Lady Cressage. You'll be interested in her—because a few years ago she was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder—he would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived—but he was drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!” he started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face—“it didn't in the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. How did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?”
Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. “Why, you introduced me to him yourself, didn't you?” he asked, slowly.
Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it over in his mind. “By George! I think you're right,” he said. “I'd quite forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see—oh yes, I reconstruct it readily enough now. Poor old chappie—he needs all he can get. He was bothering her about money—that was it, I remember now—but what an idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying—there's no one else but my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster—twenty or thereabouts—and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army. If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well—that's the party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. If you've finished your cigarette”—he threw his own into the grate, and rose as he spoke—“we may as well be moving along. By the way,” he concluded, as they walked toward the door, “I've an idea that we won't say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to keep it as a little surprise—for my mother and sister, you know.”
Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a new footing of assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of everything.
The Hon. Balder Plowden—a tall, heavily-built
