Aladdin of London, or The Lodestar

The curate expressed no profound desire to accept this promising invitation, and desiring to change so thorny a subject entered a delightful old-world garden and invited Alban's attention to a superb view of Harrow and the Welsh Harp. In the hall, to which at last they returned, he spoke of that more substantial reality, dinner.

"I am sorry to say that I have a Dorcas meeting to-night and cannot possibly dine with you," he explained to the astonished lad. "I shall return at nine o'clock, however, to see that all is as Mr. Gessner wishes. The servants have told you, perhaps, that Miss Anna is in the country and does not return until to-morrow. This old house is very dull without her, Kennedy. It is astonishing how much difference a pretty face makes to any house."

"Is that Miss Anna's portrait over the fireplace, sir?"

"You know her, Kennedy?"

"I have seen her once, on the balcony of a house in St. James' Square. That was last night when I was on my way to sleep in a cellar."

"My poor, poor boy, and to-night you will sleep in one of the most beautiful rooms in England. How wonderful is fortune, how amazing--er--how very--is not that seven o'clock by the way? I think that it is, and here is Fellows come to show you your room. You will find that we have done our best for you in the matter of clothes--guesswork, I fear, Kennedy, but still our best. To-morrow Westman the tailor is to come--I think and hope you will put up with borrowed plumes until he can fit you up. In the meantime, Fellows has charge of your needs. I am sure that he will do his very best for you."

The young butler said that he would--his voice was still raised to a little just dignity, and he, in company with Silas Geary, the housekeeper and the servants' hall had already put the worst construction possible upon Alban's reception into the house. His determination to patronize the "young man" however received an abrupt check when Alban suddenly ordered him to show the way upstairs. "He spoke like a Duke," Fellows said in the kitchen afterwards. "There I was running up the stairs just as though the Guv'ner were behind me. Don't you think that you can come it easy with him--he ain't the sort by a long way. I tell you, I never was so astonished since the Guv'ner raised my wages."

Alban, of course, was sublimely unconscious of this. He had been conducted to an enormous bedroom on the first floor, superbly furnished with old Chippendale and excellent modern Sèvres--and there he had been left to realize for the first time that he was alone and that all which had happened since yesterday was not a dream but a hard invincible truth so full of meaning, so wonderful, so sure that the eyes of his brain did not dare to look at it unflinchingly. Boyishly and with a boy's gesture he had thrown himself upon the bed and hidden his face from the light as though the very atmosphere of this wonder world were insupportable. Good God, that it should have happened to him, Alban Kennedy; that it should have been spoken of as his just right; that he should have been told that he had a claim which none might refute! A hundred guesses afforded no clue to the solution of the mystery. He could not tell himself that he was in some way related to Richard Gessner, the banker; he could not believe that his dead parents had any claim upon this foreigner who received him coldly and yet would hear nothing of his departure. Pride had little share in this, for the issues were momentous. It was sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss, had put him on this pinnacle--beyond all, had placed him in Anna Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose goal lay beyond the City Beautiful of his dreams.