At eleven o’clock the next morning Richard presented himself at the door of a house in Avenue Road, St. John’s Wood, and expressed a desire to see Mr. Westlake.  That gentleman was at home; he received the visitor in his study—­a spacious room luxuriously furnished, with a large window looking upon a lawn.  The day was sunny and warm, but a clear fire equalised the temperature of the room.  There was an odour of good tobacco, always most delightful when it blends with the scent of rich bindings.

It was Richard’s first visit to this house.  A few days ago he would, in spite of himself, have been somewhat awed by the man-servant at the door, the furniture of the hall, the air of refinement in the room he entered.  At present he smiled on everything.  Could he not command the same as soon as he chose?

Mr. Westlake rose from his writing-table and greeted his visitor with a hearty grip of the hand.  He was a man pleasant to look upon; his face, full of intellect, shone with the light of good-will, and the easy carelessness of his attire prepared one for the genial sincerity which marked his way of speaking.  He wore a velvet jacket, a grey waistcoat buttoning up to the throat, grey trousers, fur-bordered slippers; his collar was very deep, and instead of the ordinary shirt-cuffs, his wrists were enclosed in frills.  Long-haired, full-bearded, he had the forehead of an idealist and eyes whose natural expression was an indulgent smile.

A man of letters, he had struggled from obscure poverty to success and ample means; at three-and-thirty he was still hard pressed to make both ends meet, but the ten subsequent years had built for him this pleasant home and banished his long familiar anxieties to the land of nightmare.  ‘It came just in time,’ he was in the habit of saying to those who had his confidence.  ’I was at the point where a man begins to turn sour, and I should have soured in earnest.’  The process had been most effectually arrested.  People were occasionally found to say that his books had a tang of acerbity; possibly this was the safety-valve at work, a hint of what might have come had the old hunger-demons kept up their goading.  In the man himself you discovered an extreme simplicity of feeling, a frank tenderness, a noble indignation.  For one who knew him it was not difficult to understand that he should have taken up extreme social views, still less that he should act upon his convictions.  All his writing foretold such a possibility, though on the other hand it exhibited devotion to forms of culture which do not as a rule predispose to democratic agitation.  The explanation was perhaps too simple to be readily hit upon; the man was himself so supremely happy that with his disposition the thought of tyrannous injustice grew intolerable to him.  Some incidents happened to set his wrath blazing, and henceforth, in spite of not a little popular ridicule and much shaking of the head among his friends, Mr. Westlake had his mission.