e?"

He bowed, and pointed to a chair close to his own. Then he sat down
again, and I followed his example.

"I have received hundreds of replies to my advertisement," was his
first remark, "and the reason why your application is one of the few I
have answered is that I liked the frank way in which you expressed
yourself. Can you sing?"

"Sing?" I exclaimed, startled at the unexpected question.

"Sing," he repeated.

"Well, yes, I do sing occasionally," I said. "That is to say, I used
to at the sing-songs in France at sergeants' messes, and so on. But
perhaps you mightn't consider it singing if you heard me," I ended
lightly.

"Very good, very good," he observed absent-mindedly. "And you can
drive a Rolls?"

"I can drive a Rolls and several other cars as well," I answered. "I
was a driver in the R. A. S. C. early in the war."

Suddenly he focused his gaze upon me, and his keen, penetrating gray
eyes seemed to pierce into my soul and read my inmost thoughts. For
perhaps half a minute he remained looking at me like that, then
suddenly he said shortly:

"You are engaged, Mr. Hargreave. Your salary will be six hundred
pounds a year, paid monthly in advance, in addition to your living and
incidental expenses. I leave for Yorkshire by the midday train from
King's Cross to-morrow, and you will come with me. Good afternoon, Mr.
Hargreave. By the way, you might take this suit-case with you, and
bring it to the station to-morrow," and he pointed to a small
suit-case of brown leather on the floor beside his chair.

The whole interview had not lasted three minutes and I went
away obsessed by a feeling of astonishment. Mr. Rayne had not
cross-questioned me, as I naturally had expected him to do, nor had
he asked for my credentials. In addition he had fixed my salary at
six hundred pounds, without even inquiring what wages I wanted.

Obviously a character, an oddity, I said to myself as I passed out of
the hotel.

Had I suspected then that Mr. Rudolph Rayne was the sort of "oddity" I
later found him to be, I should have refused to accept the situation
even had he offered me two thousand a year.

Though, during the interview, my attention had been more or less
concentrated on Mr. Rayne, I had not been so deeply engrossed as to
fail to notice an exceptionally beautiful, dark-eyed girl, who had
entered while we had been speaking and who was seated on a settee a
little way off. She, too, had stared very hard at me.

M