Even at that she didn’t consider him seriously, she looked for him and missed him when he didn’t appear solely because of a secret hope that some day that other one would come back to meet him in the cafe.

Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have said.

Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake absented himself for several weeks, and when he showed up again his visits were fewer and more widely spaced.

On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary day, he sauntered in with his habitual air of having in particular nothing to do and all the time there was to do it in, and found a man waiting for him.

This was a person whom Sofia had quite overlooked after one glance had classified and pigeon-holed him.  A single glance had been enough.  They do some things better in England; a man cast for any particular role in life, for example, is apt to conform himself, mentally, physically, and even as to his outer habiliments, so nicely to the mould that he is forever unmistakably what he is even to the most casual observer.  So this man was a butler, he had been born and bred a butler, he lived by buttling, a butler he would die; not a pompous, turkeycock butler, such as the American stage will offer you when it takes up English fashionable life in a serious way, but a mild-mannered, decent body, with plain side-whiskers, chopped short on a line with the lobes of his ears, otherwise clean-shaven, his hair pathetically dyed, a colourless cast of countenance, eyes meek and mild.

He was soberly dressed in black coat and waistcoat, the latter showing a white triangle of hard-polished shirt and a black bow tie, with indefinite gray trousers and square-toed boots by no means new.  His middle was crossed by a thick silver watch-chain, and curious, old-fashioned buttons of agate set in square frames of gold fastened his round stiff cuffs of yesterday.  He carried a well-brushed bowler as unfashionable as unseasonable.

When Mr. Karslake entered, the polished pattern of a young gentleman of means, slenderly well set-up in an exquisitely tailored brown lounge suit, wearing a boater and carrying a slender malacca stick in one chamois-gloved hand, the butler stood up at his table, quietly acknowledged his greeting—­“Ah, Nogam! you here already?”—­and waited for the younger man to be seated before resuming his own chair:  a stoop-shouldered symbol of self-respecting respectability, not too intelligent, subdued by definite and unresentful acceptance of “his place.”

Their table was the one immediately beyond the buffet; and the cafe was very quiet, with only three other patrons, two of whom were playing chess while the third was reading an old issue of the Echo de Paris.  So Sofia could, if she had cared to eavesdrop, have overheard everything that passed between Mr. Karslake and the man Nogam.  But she didn’t; their first few speeches failed to excite her curiosity in the least.