We walked through the great, massive mahogany door, and he paused to
introduce me to a middle-aged man that stood in the doorway. "Florey,"
he said, kindly and easily, "I want you to meet Mr. Killdare."

His tone alone would have identified the man's station, even if the dark
garb hadn't told the story plainly. Florey was unquestionably Nealman's
butler. Nor could anyone have mistaken his walk of life, in any street
of any English-speaking city. He was the kind of butler one sees upon
the stage but rarely in a home, the kind one associates with old,
stately English homes but which one rarely finds in fact--almost too
good a butler to be true. He was little and subdued and gray, gray of
hair and face and hands, and his soft voice, his irreproachable attitude
of respect and deference seemed born in him by twenty generations of
butlers. He said he was glad to know me, and his bony, soft-skinned hand
took mine.

I'm afraid I stared at Florey. I had lived too long in the forest:
the staring habit, so disconcerting to tenderfeet on their first
acquaintance with the mountain people, was surely upon me. I think that
the school of the forest teaches, first of all, to look long and sharply
while you have a chance. The naturalist who follows the trail of wild
game, even the sportsman knows this same fact--for the wild creatures
are incredibly furtive and give one only a second's glimpse. I
instinctively tried to learn all I could of the gray old servant in the
instant that I shook his hand.

He was the butler, now and forever, and I wondered if, beneath that
gray skin, he were really human at all. Did he know human passion, human
ambition and desires: sheltered in his master's house, was he set apart
from the lusts and the madnesses, the calms and the storms, the triumphs
and the defeats that made up the lives of other men? Yet his gray,
rather dim old eyes told me nothing. There were no fires, visible to me,
glowing in their depths. A human clam--better still, a gray mole that
lives out his life in darkness.

From him we passed up the stairs and to a big, cool study that
apparently joined his bedroom. There were desks and chairs and a letter
file. Edith Nealman was writing at the typewriter.

If I had ever supposed that the girl had taken the position of her
uncle's secretary merely as a girlish whim, or in some emergency until a
permanent secretary could be secured, I was swiftly disillusioned. There
was nothing of the ama