She gave a direction for the visitor to be brought in.  He was a big old man.  His body looked long and muscular like that of some type of Englishmen, but his head and his features were Mongolian.  He was entirely bald, as bald as the palm of a hand, as though bald from his mother he had so remained to this incredible age.  And age was the impression that he profoundly presented.  But it was age that a tough vitality in the man resisted; as though the assault of time wore it down slowly and with almost an imperceptible detritus.  The great naked head and the wide Mongolian face were unshrunken; they presented, rather, the aspect of some old child.  He was dressed with extreme care, in the very best evening clothes that one could buy in a London shop.

He bowed, oddly, with a slow doubling of the body, and when he spoke the girl felt that he was translating his words through more than one language; as though one were to put one’s sentences into French or Italian and from that, as a sort of intermediary, into English — as though the way were long, and unfamiliar from the medium in which the man thought to the one in which he was undertaking to express it.  But at the end of this involved mental process his English sentences appeared correctly, and with an accurate selection in the words.

“You must pardon the hour, Miss Carstair,” he said, in his slow, precise articulation, “but I am required to see you and it is the only time I have.”

Then his eyes caught the necklace on the table, and advancing with two steps he stooped over it.

For a moment everything else seemed removed, from about the man.  His angular body, in its unfamiliar dress, was doubled like a finger; his great head with its wide Mongolian face was close down over the buhl top of the table and his finger moved the heap of rubies.

The girl had a sudden inspiration.

“Lord Eckhart got these jewels from you?”

The man paused, he seemed to be moving the girl’s words backward through the intervening languages.

Then he replied.

“Yes,” he said, “from us.”

The girl’s inspiration was now illumined by a further light.

“And you have not been paid for them?”

The man stood up now.  And again this involved process of moving the words back through various translations was visible — and the answer up.

“Yes — " he said, “we have been paid.”

Then he added, in explanation of his act.

“These rubies have no equal in the world — and the gold-work attaching them together is extremely old.  I am always curious to admire it.”

He looked down at the girl, at the necklace, at the space about them, as though he were deeply, profoundly puzzled.

“We had a fear,” he said, " — it was wrong!”

Then he put his hand swiftly into the bosom pocket of his evening coat, took out a thin packet wrapped in a piece of vellum and handed it to the girl.