The Man Who Bought London Read Online Free PDF

second,’ said Elsie.
    Her duty was clear. They were binding her to lie. She had not taken Gillett’s message seriously. She had not even grasped the elementary fact that the grey-haired stranger in the tube was the great King Kerry, multi-millionaire and controller of billions. Her head was whirling with the happenings of the day – she was intoxicated by novelty, and only the natural and buoyant healthy outlook of the girl kept her any way near to normal.
    Leete took stock of her and wondered he had not noticed her before. She was a beautiful girl with her fine grey eyes, and the mass of hair that half-framed her face in a cloud of russet gold.The hands were small and shapely, the figure slender and straight. Even the unattractive uniform which Messrs Tack and Brighten insisted upon their girls wearing did not detract from her beauty. Now, with faint shadows which an insufficiency of sleep and a lack of food had painted beneath her eyes, she was ethereal and rather adorable. So thought Mr Leete, no mean judge, and he stroked his bristly grey-black moustache reflectively.
    She half turned to the door.
    ‘You will not require me any more?’ she asked.
    ‘Remember!’ Again Leete was shaking his ridiculous finger at her. ‘Criminal libel means imprisonment.’
    ‘I don’t feel like laughing this morning,’ said Elsie Marion; ‘but you are tempting me awfully.’
    She closed the door behind her before Mr Leete had time to express his wishes about her eyes, her soul, and her obscure relations. For Mr Leete had no respect for anybody whose name was not in Burke’s Landed Gentry .
    She turned up to the dressing-room and found herself besieged by an admiring crowd of girls, for the news that Miss Marion had ‘cheeked’ Tack and lived to tell the tale was common property.
    She repressed a natural and human inclination to reveal the fact that she was lunching at the Savoy, and fled from the building before she betrayed her great secret.
    Mr Kerry was waiting in the entrance hall of the hotel alone. It seemed to the girl that every eye in the great vestibule was focused on him and in this surmise she was probably right, for a billionaire is something out of the ordinary; but a billionaire who had escaped assassination at the hands of a former ‘friend’, and whose name, in consequence, was on every evening newspaper placard in London, was most wonderful of all.
    Throughout the meal, taken at a table overlooking the river, they talked on a variety of subjects. He was an especially well-read man, with a penchant for the Persian poets, and was a delighted and unconventionally demonstrative man – leaning across the table to stroke her hand – when she capped a couplet from Hafiz with a verse from Sadi –
    ‘Though we are straws laid down to warm the sod, We once were flowers in the eyes of God.’
    ‘Excellent! splendid!’ he cried. ‘I don’t remember that rendering of the poem.’
    ‘It is a rendering I made myself,’ she confessed. She had seen a translation and had improved upon it.
    They meandered through the most delicious lunch Elsie had eaten since the extravagant days of Aunt Martha. He encouraged her to talk of that relative. ‘A fine woman,’ he called her enthusiastically. ‘I love these people who spend all their money.’
    She shook her head laughingly.
    ‘That is not your creed, Mr Kerry,’ she challenged.
    ‘It is – it is!’ he said eagerly; ‘here is my parable of finance. Money is water. The sea is the wealth of the nations. It is evaporated and drawn up to the sky and is sprinkled upon the earth. For some of us it runs in deep channels, and if we are skilful we can dam it for our use. Some of us dam it deeply, and some shallowly. With some it just filters away and is swallowed up, only to reappear in somebody else’s dam.’
    She nodded. It was a new imagery, and the conceit pleased her.
    ‘If you keep it stagnant it is no use,’ he went on, as eager as a boy. ‘You must let it