"Very well. But before you show him up, ask this Mr. Calendar if he is quite sure he wants to see Philip Kirkwood."

"Yessir."

The child marched out, punctiliously closing the door. Kirkwood tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed energetically, dismissing the interruption to his reverie as a matter of no consequence—an obvious mistake to be rectified by two words with this Mr. Calendar whom he did not know. At the knock he had almost hoped it might be Brentwick, returning with a changed mind about the bid to dinner.

He regretted Brentwick sincerely. Theirs was a curious sort of friendship—extraordinarily close in view of the meagerness of either's information about the other, to say nothing of the disparity between their ages. Concerning the elder man Kirkwood knew little more than that they had met on shipboard, "coming over"; that Brentwick had spent some years in America; that he was an Englishman by birth, a cosmopolitan by habit, by profession a gentleman (employing that term in its most uncompromisingly British significance), and by inclination a collector of "articles of virtue and bigotry," in pursuit of which he made frequent excursions to the Continent from his residence in a quaint quiet street of Old Brompton. It had been during his not infrequent, but ordinarily abbreviated, sojourns in Paris that their steamer acquaintance had ripened into an affection almost filial on the one hand, almost paternal on the other....

There came a rapping at the door.

Kirkwood removed the pipe from between his teeth long enough to say "Come in!" pleasantly.

The knob was turned, the door opened. Kirkwood, swinging on one heel, beheld hesitant upon the threshold a rather rotund figure of medium height, clad in an expressionless gray lounge suit, with a brown "bowler" hat held tentatively in one hand, an umbrella weeping in the other. A voice, which was unctuous and insinuative, emanated from the figure.

"Mr. Kirkwood?"

Kirkwood nodded, with some effort recalling the name, so detached had been his thoughts since the disappearance of the page.

"Yes, Mr. Calendar—?"

"Are you—ah—busy, Mr. Kirkwood?"

 Prev. P 9/252 next