His dress was a model of style. The pale grey suits he favoured in summer always looked fresh from the tailor’s hand, and his spats and grey suede gloves were immaculate. He carried a gold-headed cane and wore a flower in his button-hole, usually a white carnation or a rosebud. Once when he met Laura out in the village he swept off his Panama hat in a bow so low that she felt like a princess. But his manners were always courtly. It was not at all surprising to be told that he had formerly held some position at the Court of Queen Victoria. Which perhaps he had, perhaps not, for nothing was really known about him, excepting that he was apparently rich and obviously aged. Laura and Miss Lane knew and the postman may have noticed that he had many letters with crests and coronets on the flap of the envelope, and Laura knew that he had once sent a telegram signed with his Christian name to a very great personage indeed. But, his servants being what they were, such things were not matter for village gossip.

Like all those of good birth Laura met when in business, his voice was quiet and natural, and he was pleasant in his manner towards her. One morning he found her alone in the office, and perhaps intending to cheer what he may have thought her loneliness, he asked: “Do you like ciphers?” Laura was not at all sure what kind of a cipher he meant—it could not be the figure nought, surely—but she said, “Yes, I think so,” and he wrote with a tiny gold pencil on a leaf torn from his pocket-book:

U O A O, but I O thee.

I give thee A O, but O O me,

which, seeing her puzzled look, he interpreted:

‘You sigh for a cipher, but I sigh for thee.

I give thee a cipher, but O sigh for me.’

And, on another occasion, he handed her the riddle:

The beginning of Eternity,

The end of Time and Space,

The beginning of every end

And the end of every place,

to which she soon discovered that the answer was the letter “‘E.”

Laura wondered in riper years how many times and in how many different environments he had written those very puzzles to amuse other girls, unlike her in everything but age.