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.

There was a fireplace of cracked and dirty marble with an engraving hung
over it, representing the coronation of Queen Victoria. A gas stove
occupied the grate, and a gas bracket stuck out from the wall on either
side of the picture.

On the small round mahogany table that stood in the middle of the room
lay a Bible, and a copy of the _St. James's Gazette_, which was dated a
week back. Juliet took it up and read an account of a cricket match
without much enthusiasm. Then she flung it down and wandered about the
room once more; but she had exhausted all its possibilities; and though
she took a volume entitled _Causes Celebres_ from the shelf, and turned
its pages hopefully, she put it back with a grimace at its dullness and a
sort of surprise at finding anything drier than the cricket.

She had waited half an hour, when the door opened and the face of Nicol