“I was there this morning, but only for five minutes. He gave me some instructions about a call I had to make in the city.”

“I wish you could leave him and get some other work as secretary. I don’t like him. He isn’t what he pretends to be, I’m sure he isn’t.”

“He pretends to be nothing,” laughed her brother. “Old Sam is a millionaire, and millionaires need no pretence. He could buy up this show twice over, and then leave a million for the death duties. You’ve taken a prejudice against him.”

“A woman’s prejudice—which often is not very far wrong.”

“I know that you women see much further than we men do, but in this, Marion, you are quite wrong. Old Sam is eccentric and mean, but at heart he’s not at all a bad old fellow.”

“Well, I tell you frankly, I don’t half like your going to Servia under his auspices.”

Charlie Rolfe laughed aloud.

“My dear Marion, of what are you apprehensive?” he asked. “I go in a very responsible position, as his confidential secretary, to inquire into certain matters in his interests. If I carry out my mission successfully, I shall get a rise of salary.”

“Granted. But you know what you’re told me about the queer stories afloat regarding Samuel Statham and his house in Park Lane.”

“I’ve never believed them, although they are, of course, curious. Yet you must remember that every man of great wealth has mysterious stories put about by his enemies. Every man and every woman has enemies. Who has not?”

“But you’ve admitted yourself that you’ve never been in more than one room in the mansion,” she said, looking him straight in the face.

“That’s true. But it doesn’t prove anything, does it?” he asked. And Marion saw that he was nervous and agitated, quite unlike his usual self. Perhaps, however, it was on account of her apprehensions, she thought.

She had only seen Samuel Statham, the well-known millionaire, on one occasion. She had called at the offices in Old Broad Street one afternoon to see her brother, who was his confidential secretary, when the old fellow had entered, a short, round-shouldered, grey-bearded old man, rather shabbily-dressed, who, looking at her, bluntly asked who she was and what she wanted there.

One of his eccentricities was that he hated women, and Marion knew that.

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