A gloomy little clerk climbed down from a high stool where he sat writing, and opened the door.
"Oh yes, Miss Juliet Byrne," he said when Juliet had told him her name. "Mr. Findlay is expecting you. Will you walk upstairs, Miss Byrne, please. I think you have an appointment for twelve o'clock? This way, if you please."
He led the way up a steep and narrow flight of stairs, which rose out of the black shadows at the end of the passage.
"Ladies find these stairs rather dark, I'm afraid," he remarked pleasantly, as he held open a door and ushered Juliet and her maid into an empty room. "Will you kindly wait here," he continued. "Mr. Findlay is engaged for the moment. You are a leetle before your time, I believe." He pulled out his watch and examined it closely. "Not quite the hour yet," he repeated, and closed it with a snap. "But Mr. Findlay will see you as soon as he is disengaged."
With a flourish of his handkerchief he withdrew, shutting the door behind him.
Juliet sat down on a hard chair covered with green leather, and told her maid to take another. Her spirits were damped. The sight of Mr. Nicol, as the clerk was named, often had that effect upon persons who saw him for the first time; indeed he was found to be a very useful check on troublesome clients, who arrived full of determination to have their own way, and were often so cowed by their preliminary interview with Nicol as to feel it a privilege and a relief subsequently to be bullied by Mr. Ince, or persuaded by Mr. Findlay into the belief that what they had previously decided on was the last thing advisable to do.
Mr. Findlay frequently remarked to Mr. Ince, when his partner's easily roused temper was more highly tried than usual by some imbecile mistake of the clerk's, that Nicol might have faults as a clerk and as a man, but that, as a buffer, he was the nearest approach to perfection obtainable in this world of makeshifts.
To which Mr. Ince would reply with point and fluency that fenders could be had by the dozen from any shipping warehouse, at a lower cost than one week's salary of Nicol's would represent, and would be far more efficient in the office. Still he did not suggest dismissing the man.
Juliet, as she sat and looked round the musty little waiting-room, felt that here was an end of her dreams of the resplendent family she was to find pining to take her to its heart. She felt certain that she could never have any feelings in common with people who could employ a firm of solicitors which in its turn was served by the man who had received her. Romance and the clerk could never, she thought, meet under one roof. And such a roof! The room in which she sat was so dark, so gloomy, so bare and cheerless, that Juliet began to wonder whether she would not have been wiser not to have come. This was not a place, surely, which fond parents would choose for a long-deferred meeting with their child, after years of separation. She walked to the window, but the only view was of a blank wall, and that so close that she could have touched it by leaning out. No wonder the room was dark, even at midday in August. The walls were lined with bookshelves, where heavy volumes, all dealing with the same subject, that of law, stood shoulder to shoulder in stout bindings of brown leather.