"I have kept you waiting," she murmured.
The soft sound of her voice came to his ears as from a distance. It bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror's self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and fluttered beneath it, and shrank away.
He squared his big shoulders and lifted his head.
Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned and led her toward the sofa. Halting, he bowed with an exaggerated genuflection and flourish of his free hand to Miss Madden, the while he flashed at her a glance at once of challenge and of deprecation. Through the sensitized contact of the other hand, he felt that the woman he held bowed also, and in his own spirit of confused defiance and entreaty.
The laugh he gave then seemed to dispel the awkwardness which had momentarily hung over the mocking salutation.
Miss Madden laughed too. "Oh, I surrender," she said.
"You drag congratulations from me."
Some quality in the tone of this ungracious speech had the effect of putting the party at its ease.
Lady Cressage seated herself beside her friend on the sofa, and gently, abstractedly, patted one of her hands.
Thorpe remained on his feet, looking down at the pair with satisfied cheerfulness. He tool, a slip of paper from his pocket, to support a statement he was making.
"I'm forever telling you what a strain the City is on a man in my position," he said--"and today I had the curiosity to keep an account of what happened. Here it is.
I had thirty callers. Of those, how many do you suppose came to see me on my own business? Just eight. That is to say, their errands were about investments of mine, but most of them managed to get in some word about axes of their own to grind. All the rest made no pretence at all of thinking about anybody but themselves.
I've classified them, one by one, here.
"First, there were six men who wanted me to take shares of one sort or another, and I had to more or less listen to what they tried to make out their companies were like.
They were none of them any good. Eight different fellows came to me with schemes that haven't reached the company stage. One had a scheme for getting possession of a nigger republic in the West Indies by raising a loan, and then repudiating all the previous loans.
Another wanted me to buy a paper for him, in which he was to support all my enterprises. Another wanted to start a bank--I apparently to find the money, and he the brains.
One chap wanted me to finance a theatrical syndicate--he had a bag full of photographs of an actress all eyes and teeth and hair,--and another chap had a scheme all worked out for getting a concession from Spain for one of the Caroline Islands, and putting up a factory there for making porpoise-hide leather.
"Then there were three inventors--let's see, here they are--one with a coiled wire spring for scissors inside a pocket-knife, and one with a bottle, the whole top of which unscrews instead of having a cork or stopper, and one with an electrical fish-line, a fine wire inside the silk, you know, which connects with some battery when a fish bites, and rings a bell, and throws out hooks in various directions, and does all sorts of things.
"Well then, there was a man who wanted me to take the chairmanship of a company, and one who wanted me to guarantee an overdraft at his bank, and two who wanted to borrow money on stock, and one parson-fellow who tried to stick me for a subscription to some Home or other he said he had for children in the country.
He was the worst bounder of the lot.
"Well, there's twenty-seven people--and twenty of them strangers to me, and not worth a penny to me, and all trying to get money out of me. Isn't that a dog's life for one?""I don't know," said Miss Madden, contemplatively.
"A lady may have twice that number of callers in an afternoon--quite as great strangers to all intents and purposes--and not even have the satisfaction of discovering that they had any object whatever in calling.
At least your people had some motive: the grey matter in their brain was working. And besides, one of them might have had something to say which you would value.
I don't think that ever happens among a lady's callers;does it, Edith?"
Edith smiled, pleasantly and yet a little wistfully, but said nothing.
"At any rate," Thorpe went on, with a kind of purpose gathering in his eyes, "none of those fellows cost me anything, except in time. But then I had three callers, almost in a bunch, and one of them took out of me thirty thousand pounds, and another fifteen thousand pounds, and the third--an utter stranger he was--he got an absolute gratuity of ten thousand pounds, besides my consent to a sale which, if I had refused it, would have stood me in perhaps forty or fifty thousand pounds more.
You ladies may thank your stars you don't have that kind of callers!"The sound of these figures in the air brought a constrained look to the faces of the women. Seemingly they confronted a subject which was not to their liking.
The American, however, after a moment's pause, took it up in an indifferent manner.
"You speak of an 'absolute gratuity.' I know nothing of London City methods--but isn't ten thousand pounds a gratuity on a rather large scale?"Thorpe hesitated briefly, then smiled, and, with slow deliberation, drew up a chair and seated himself before them. "Perhaps Idon't mind telling you about it," he began, and paused again.
"I had a letter in my mail this morning," he went on at last, giving a sentimental significance to both tone and glance--"a letter which changed everything in the world for me, and made me the proudest and happiest man above ground.
