“Shall I ask her to call again, sir?”

“No.  I’ll see her.  Where is she?”

“In the dining-room, sir.”

“Show her into the study.”

* * * * *

Nothing could have been more distant and reserved than Rowcliffe’s dining-room.  But, to a young woman who had made up her mind that she didn’t want to know anything about him, Rowcliffe’s study said too much.  It told her that he was a ferocious and solitary reader; for in the long rows of book shelves the books leaned slantwise across the gaps where his hands had rummaged and ransacked.  It told her that his gods were masculine and many—­Darwin and Spencer and Haeckel, Pasteur, Curie and Lord Lister, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman and Bernard Shaw.  Their photogravure portraits hung above the bookcase.  He was indifferent to mere visible luxury, or how could he have endured the shabby drugget, the cheap, country wall-paper with its design of dreadful roses on a white watered ground?  But the fire in the grate and the deep arm-chair drawn close to it showed that he loved warmth and comfort.  That his tastes made him solitary she gathered from the chair’s comparatively unused and unworn companion, lurking and sulking in the corner where it had been thrust aside.

The one window of this room looked to the west upon a little orchard, gray trunks of apple trees and plum trees against green grass, green branches against gray stone, gray that was softened in the liquid autumn air, green that was subtle, exquisite, charmingly austere.

He could see his little orchard as he sat by his fire.  She thought she rather liked him for keeping his window so wide open.

She was standing by it looking at the orchard as he came in.

* * * * *

He was so quiet in his coming that she did not see or hear him till he stood before her.

And in his eyes, intensely quiet, there was a look of wonder and of incredulity, almost of concern.

Greetings and introductions over, the unused arm-chair was brought out from its lair in the corner.  Rowcliffe, in his own arm-chair, sat in shadow, facing her.  What light there was fell full on her.

“I’m sorry you should have had to come to me,” he said, “your sister was here a minute or two ago.”

“My sister?”

“I think it must have been your sister.  She said it was her sister I was to go and see.”

“I didn’t know she was coming.  She never told me.”

“Pity.  I was coming out to see you first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Then you know?  She told you?”

“She told me something.”  He smiled.  “She must have been a little overanxious.  You don’t look as if there was very much the matter with you.”

“But there isn’t.  It isn’t me.”

“Who is it then?”

“My other sister.”

“Oh.  I seem to have got a little mixed.”