“This person — was he a gentleman?” she inquired.  The girl answered immediately.  “I thought about that a good deal,” she said.  “He had perfect manners, quite Continental manners; but, as you say over here, Americans are so imitative one never can tell.  He was not young — near fifty, I would say; very well dressed.  He was from St. Paul; a London agent for some flouring mills in the Northwest.  I don’t know precisely.  He explained it all to Sir Henry.  I think he would have been glad of a little influence — some way to meet the purchasing agents for the government.  He seemed to have the American notion that he could come to London and go ahead without knowing anybody.  Anyway, he was immensely interesting — and he had a ripping motor.”

The old man at the window did not move.  He remained looking out over the English country with his big, veined hands clasped behind his back.  He had left this interview to Lady Mary, as he had left most of the crucial affairs of life to her dominant nature.  But the thing touched him far deeper than it touched the aged dowager.  He had a man’s faith in the fidelity of a loved woman.

He knew how his son, somewhere in France, trusted this girl, believed in her, as long ago in a like youth he had believed in another.  He knew also how the charm of the girl was in the young soldier’s blood, and how potent were these inscrutable mysteries.  Every man who loved a woman wished to believe that she came to him out of the garden of a convent — out of a roc’s egg, like the princess in the Arabian story.

All these things he had experienced in himself, in a shattered romance, in a disillusioned youth, when he was young like the lad somewhere in France.  Lady Mary would see only broken conventions; but he saw immortal things, infinitely beyond conventions, awfully broken.  He did not move.  He remained like a painted picture.

The girl went on in her soft, slow voice.  “You would have disliked Mr. Meadows, Lady Mary,” she said.  “You would dislike any American who came without letters and could not be precisely placed.”  The girl’s voice grew suddenly firmer.  “I don’t mean to make it appear better,” she said.  “The worst would be nearer the truth.  He was just an unknown American bagman, with a motor car, and a lot of time on his hands — and I picked him up.  But Sir Henry Marquis took a fancy to him.”

“I cannot understand Henry,” the old woman repeated.  “It’s extraordinary.”

“It doesn’t seem extraordinary to me,” said the girl.  “Mr. Meadows was immensely clever, and Sir Henry was like a man with a new toy.  The Home Secretary had just put him in as Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department.  He was full of a lot of new ideas — dactyloscopic bureaus, photographie mitrique, and scientific methods of crime detection.  He talked about it all the time.  I didn’t understand half the talk.  But Mr. Meadows was very clever.  Sir Henry said he was a charming person.  Anybody who could discuss the whorls of the Galton finger-print tests was just then a charming person to Sir Henry.”