background. I thought, as the door of the salon was opened for me by
the smart Arab servant, that the room was untenanted, and that Sir
Marcus Lark meant to keep me waiting; but there he was, on the balcony,
gazing in rapture at the shining river. As if he were capable of
raptures, he, an earth-bound worm! But there was no mistaking that
back, those shoulders, or the face, as the big body turned. He advanced
through the open window, holding out a hand as big as a steak. He was
exactly like his photograph, except that there was even more of him
than I had been led to expect. The pretty room was net small, but
entering, he seemed to turn it into a doll's house parlour. "Six foot
two, if he's an inch!" I said to myself, longing to play David to his
Goliath. "Big, rich, common brute!" I thought. "You snatch our mountain
out of our mouths, and then you send for us as if we were servants--men
whose boots you ought to be blacking!" I was vindictive. I stared him
straight between the eyes--where a stone from David's sling would have
fitted in neatly.

The eyes were wide apart, and kinder than in the photographs. They were
even curiously innocent, and boyish. His grin of greeting made the
large, waxed black moustache point joyously up. He showed teeth white
as a child's, and had dimples--actually dimples--in his big cheeks, to
say nothing of the one in his chin, with which snapshots had
familiarized me. He looked like a huge, overgrown schoolboy with a
corked moustache. My glare faded in the light of his smile. No man with
a gleam of humour could have kept a mask of grimness. I found my hand
enveloped in the pound of steak, and warmly shaken up and down inside
it.

"Lord Ernest Borrow, I'm delighted to see you. Very good of you to
come, I'm sure!" to David quoth Goliath, in a big voice, mellow despite