half-an-hour. He
had a face capable of a hundred expressions per day. His present
expression was one of his anxious expressions, medium in degree. It can
be figured in the mask of a person who is locked up in an iron
strongroom, and, feeling ill at ease, notices that the walls are getting
red-hot at the corners.

"Like my photograph?" he exclaimed, astonished that he should resemble
Leek's photograph.

"Yes," she asseverated stoutly. "I knew you at once. Especially by the
nose."

"Have you got it here?" he asked, interested to see what portrait of
Leek had a nose like his own.

And she pulled out of her handbag a photograph, not of Leek, but of
Priam Farll. It was an unmounted print of a negative which he and Leek
had taken together for the purposes of a pose in a picture, and it had
decidedly a distinguished appearance. But why should Leek dispatch
photographs of his master to strange ladies introduced through a
matrimonial agency? Priam Farll could not imagine--unless it was from
sheer unscrupulous, careless bounce.

She gazed at the portrait with obvious joy.

"Now, candidly, don't _you_ think it's very, very good?" she demanded.

"I suppose it is," he agreed. He would probably have given two hundred
pounds for the courage to explain to her in a few well-chosen words that
there had been a vast mistake, a huge impulsive indiscretion. But two
hundred thousand pounds would not have bought that courage.

"I love it," she ejaculated fervently--with heat, and yet so nicely! And
she returned the photograph to her little bag.

She lowered her voice.

"You haven't told me whether you were ever married. I've been waiting
for that."

He blushed. She was disconcertingly personal.

"No," he said.

"And you've always lived like that, alone like; no home; travelling
about; no one to look after you, properly?" There was distress in her
voice.

He nodded. "One gets accustomed to it."

"Oh yes," she said. "I can understand that."

"No responsibilities," he added.

"No. I can understand all that." Then she hesitated. "But I do feel so
sorry for you... all these years!"

And her eyes were moist, and her tone was so sincere that Priam Farll
found it quite remarkably affecting. Of course she was talking about
Henry Leek, the humble valet, and not about Leek's illustrious master.
But Priam saw no difference between his lot and that of Leek. He felt
that there was no essential difference, and that, despite Leek's