Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/134

 dreams of its exiled member, abandoned to a horde of workmen, a mere wilderness of paint and whitewash; and it was with a touch of resentment that he accepted the direction of an indifferent hall-porter to an unfamiliar edifice in Pall Mall as its temporary substitute. Entering the smoking-room, a little diffidently, on the evening of his arrival in London, he found himself eyed, at first with faint curiosity, by two or three of the men upon whom his gaze rested expectantly, but in no case was this curiosity— prompted doubtless by that touch of the exotic which sometimes clings to dwellers in the East—the precursor of the kindly recognition, the surprised, incredulous greeting which he had hoped for. After a few days he was simply ignored; his face, rather stern, with its distinctive Indian tan through which the grey eyes looked almost blue, his erect figure, and dark hair sparsely flecked with a frosty white, had become familiar; he had visited his tailor, and his garments no longer betrayed him to the curious by their fashion of Rangoon.

The Blue-book, which he had been quick to interrogate, informed him that his old friend Hibbert lived in Portman Square, and that the old lady who was the guardian of his nieces had a house at Hampstead: further inquiry at the addresses thus obtained left him baffled by the intelligence that Colonel Hibbert was in Norway, his nieces at school in Switzerland. Mackinnon, late of the Woods and Forests, whom he met at Burlington House, raised his hopes for an instant by a greeting which sounded precisely the note of cordiality that he yearned for, only to dash them by expressing a hope that he should see more of his old friend in the autumn; he was off to Southampton to join a friend's yacht on the morrow, and after his cruise he had designs on Scotland and the grouse.

Sir Geoffrey, chained to the neighbourhood of London by legal