CHAPTER III.

_"MISS HARVEY."_

EDMUND HARVEY left the house of Mr. Detroit in a state of considerable preoccupation. It is not often that fortunes of £50,000 go begging in this style; or that a young solicitor has such an offer made him by a client.

That Harvey should neither have hastily accepted nor hastily refused the offer spoke well for him. He would not undertake such a trust without weighing the matter well beforehand: yet a refusal might be wrong. Somebody would have and use the money. Why should it not be in his hands a power for good?

"Hallo!" a voice said, breaking into his reverie as he went along the busy street, threading his way in the neat mechanical style of an experienced Londoner.

Harvey came to a standstill, with nod and smile of greeting.

"Fine day!" he said.

"I was under the delusion that it had begun to drizzle, but of course you know best," the other responded, with a comical glance at the murky surroundings. He was five or six years Harvey's junior, tall and blithe, with confident bearing and line outline of face—a man to be liked and trusted at first sight.

A laugh answered him.

"I had not noticed the drizzle."

"Wits gone wool-gathering?"

"I had a knotty point to unravel. I say, Campion, come home with me to dinner. My sister arrived yesterday."

"Thanks. I think I will. No engagement this evening, happily, and it is an age since I saw your sister. Let me see—she lives at Portminster. Yes, of course."

Harvey nodded.

He seemed still to be in a state of semi-abstraction, at which Campion would have wondered less had he known the cause.

"I wish I could persuade my mother to make her home in London, but nothing will induce her to leave the old neighbourhood."

Mr. Detroit was a tea-merchant. His gains had been not only through the tea-business, however. He had also been a successful speculator, in a small way, on the Stock Exchange; and much of his success in that direction was due to the keen foresight and the prudence of his "broker."

Arthur Campion was his broker. Rather singularly a personal friendship existed, and had for some time existed, between Mr. Detroit's solicitor and Mr. Detroit's broker.

Mr. Detroit's West End house being at a goodly distance from Harvey's, the latter hailed a hansom, and the two friends were speedily set down before a lofty and narrow dwelling, chocolate-tinted, in a highly respectable quarter, having about it a generally well-to-do air.

Harvey opened the front door with his latchkey, and led the way upstairs into a three-windowed drawing-room.

Campion had seen Harvey's sister before. He remembered her well: a busy active woman, somewhere in those hazy middle-aged regions which are supposed to follow directly after thirty, but which often wait a good deal longer; the very embodiment of common-sense, with a round-about little figure, plump face, and no particular features; also with powers of talk to any extent on every imaginable subject. Campion never counted Miss Harvey equal to her brother; still on the whole, he liked her, when she did not quite overpower him with her excellent theories. One may weary even of excellence, when it takes too obtrusive a form; and no man over thoroughly admires a woman who is not at least as good a listener as talker. But nobody expected Miss Harvey to condescend to the position of a listener. Life was not long enough for all she had to say.

So Campion entered the drawing-room, picturing to himself a homely figure seated primly on the sofa, knitting perpetual stockings, and ready to welcome with enthusiasm a new listener. He had actually shaped his lips into the "How do you do, Miss Harvey? Any more reclaimed vagabonds to the fore?"

But Campion never uttered those words. For the slender girl-figure, tall and reed-like, springing from a lowly position on the rug, was by no means that of the Miss Harvey whom he had known; neither were the soft grey eyes and cherry lips those of thirty or forty years.

"Harvey's sister! Why, she can't be over twenty! A quarter of a century between them," thought Campion, with perhaps excusable exaggeration, for he was much surprised.

"I have brought a friend home to dinner, Gabrielle," Harvey was saying. "Mr. Campion—my sister Gabrielle."

Gabrielle had evidently been playing with the kitten on the hearthrug, for a small fluffy creature clung still to one shoulder, with its claws in her fair hair.

Edmund Harvey, unlike many men, was a patroniser of cats. She put up one little hand to disentangle the creature, laughing, blushing, and bowing in response to the introduction.

"Had a very lonely day?" asked Harvey, depositing himself in an armchair.

"O no, not at all. Mrs. Wiseman took me in the morning for a shopping expedition, as you know, and this afternoon Mrs. Taylor drove me through the Park. I enjoyed that, of course. If only the good people there did not look so terribly bored, one might think they liked it too."

"They are taking their pleasure in their own way—English fashion," said Campion.

"It seemed to me a sad fashion. I could almost have counted the smiling faces on my fingers."

"This is Gabrielle's first visit to town," explained Harvey.

"Indeed! Then you have still to be initiated into the fashionable boredom of London life."

"But I never was bored, and I mean never to be," she retorted merrily. "Yes, I am only a country cousin; this is my first sight of London. They all said I ought to come, and Ted—Edmund, I mean—would not let me off. I like it all immensely, of course; everything is so new to me. And the Park was perfectly delightful—for a variety. I think I should soon get tired of the monotony, if it came every day."

"Monotony is commonly supposed to be the exclusive privilege of country folks."

"But I am sure I had a glimpse of it to-day, for the first time in my life."

Gabrielle presently vanished to dress for dinner, and Campion exclaimed—"This is another sister, not the one I have seen."

"She is my half-sister, a good deal younger than Mary and myself. Did you not know there was a second marriage?"

"I didn't take in the fact of a daughter, somehow, or at least that she was like—"

Campion came to a pause.

"Like this? She is a pretty creature, certainly. I have hardly begun to realise that she is leaving childhood behind. My stepmother is never content to have Gabrielle out of her sight. Otherwise, she would often have been here. My dear fellow, you must have heard her name a hundred and one times!"

Campion was not sure.

"Well, yes—her name, certainly, now I think of it," he said. "I had a sort of idea of a little school-girl—"

"Which she was until six months ago."

"A niece, or adopted child, or something of that sort?"

"Is a step-sister 'something of that sort?' Anyhow, she is a particularly nice girl. Perhaps one ought not to mention school in connection with Gabrielle. Mary has been responsible for her education."

Campion could have groaned aloud in pity for the pupil. Yet he only knew one side of the matter; and Gabrielle had been better off than he in his ignorance supposed. Mary Harvey, letting off a volley of theories for the enlightenment of a masculine hearer, and Mary Harvey in the quiet round of daily home duties, were two very different people.