He put
them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused,
playing in his beard.
The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room.
He made his way out, and downstairs to the street.
It was a rainy, windy October night, sloppy underfoot,
dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a cabman,
motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening
rubber cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep.
Thorpe hailed him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the
brusque order, "Strand!" as he clambered into the hansom.
CHAPTER II
"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe,
half an hour later: "you never did believe in me,
as a sister should do."
He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low,
rather dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted
by two flickering gasjets. They sat somewhat apart,
confronting a fireplace, where only the laid materials for
a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate. Above the
mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals
to this portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon
him of responsibility for the cheerlessness of the room.
There were other pictures on the walls of which he was
dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about Dido
and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back
to him out of the mists of his childhood.
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