His eyes did not leave her face. She had often seen in stories the word “devour” applied to an intensity of gaze, and she thought that fictional characters must look somehow as Mr Gilder was looking. He was not staring; it was the concentration, the probing investigation of those bright grey eyes, that made her writhe inside. If he had been impertinent it would have been an easy matter to have dealt with him, but he was respect itself. His attitude was deferential, his general manner was friendly. He was dressed very well and carefully, she thought, and wondered whether Arthur’s preciosity in the matter of clothing influenced his staff. The grey homespun, the rather solid shoes, were set off by the expensiveness of his linen. With a woman’s eye she saw that in his way this man was something of a dandy too.

“I hear you are going to live near us, Mr Gilder?” she said, and he was obviously taken aback.

“Why – yes,” he said awkwardly. “I’ve bought a little place near your house. I love that part of the country.”

“We shall be neighbours,” she said with a smile, but felt no pleasure in the prospect.

“Er – yes. I suppose we shall be, Miss Gine,” he agreed.

“It will be very nice for Arthur. I suppose it was his suggestion that you should come down?”

He had a nervous little trick of stroking an invisible moustache, for he was clean-shaven.

“Well – no,” he said. “I haven’t told Mr Gine yet that I have bought the property. I thought another time would be more opportune. I bought it for a song – thirty-five hundred pounds.”

She looked up quickly.

“That is an expensive song,” she said, before she realised an error of taste.

This time he was visibly disconcerted.

“Yes; I borrowed the money,” he said.

She had a feeling that he was going to ask her a favour, and guessed what the favour would be: Leslie had the uncanny gift of reading people’s minds and gathering their surface thoughts, and in those moments when Fabrian Gilder dropped his mask he was rather easy. He opened his lips to speak, thought better of it, meeting perhaps the chill atmosphere of a refusal before it was given, and then: “I’ll see if your brother is disengaged,” he said, and went into the room to Arthur Gine, his head reeling with the vision which had emerged through the grey fog of his drab life.

Day after day he had watched her, and she had never known. He had left his rod and line to steal behind trees that he might see her pass. She was romance in excelsis – the perfect realisation of thirty years of dreaming.

It took him a second to compose himself before he turned the handle and walked in, and then he stood stricken dumb by the words that came to him.

11