The Blond Beast

I

IT had been almost too easy--that was young Millner's first feeling,
as he stood again on the Spence door-step, the great moment of his
interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at
his feet.

Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous
vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the
perspective of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared
to remember Rastignac's apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard
recklessly under his small fair moustache: "Who knows?"

He, Hugh Millner, at any rate, knew a good deal already: a good deal
more than he had imagined it possible to learn in half an hour's
talk with a man like Orlando G. Spence; and the loud-rumouring city
spread out there before him seemed to grin like an accomplice who
knew the rest.

A gust of wind, whirling down from the dizzy height of the building
on the next corner, drove sharply through his overcoat and compelled
him to clutch at his hat. It was a bitter January day, a day of
fierce light and air, when the sunshine cut like icicles and the
wind sucked one into black gulfs at the street corners. But
Millner's complacency was like a warm lining to his shabby coat, and
heaving steadied his hat he continued to stand on the Spence
threshold, lost in the vision revealed to him from the Pisgah of its
marble steps. Yes, it was wonderful what the vision showed him. ...
In his absorption he might have frozen fast to the door-step if
the Rhadamanthine portals behind him had not suddenly opened to let
out a slim fur-coated figure, the figure, as he perceived, of the
youth whom he had caught in the act of withdrawal as he entered Mr.
Spence's study, and whom the latter, with a wave of his affable
hand, had detained to introduce as "my son Draper."

It was characteristic of the odd friendliness of the whole scene
that the great man should have thought it worth while to call back
and name his heir to a mere humble applicant like Millner; and that
the heir should shed on him, from a pale high-browed face, a smile
of such deprecating kindness. It was characteristic, equally, of
Millner, that he should at once mark the narrowness of the shoulders
sustaining this ingenuous head; a narrowness, as he now observed,
imperfectly concealed by the wide fur collar of young Spence's
expensive and badly cut coat. But the face took on, as the youth
smiled his surprise at their second meeting, a look of almost
plaintive good-will: the kind of look that Millner scorned and yet
could never quite resist.

"Mr. Millner? Are you--er--waiting?" the lad asked, with an
intention of serviceableness that was like a finer echo of his
father's resounding