Aaron Rodd, Diviner

A queer, unexpected streak of sunshine, which by some miracle had found its way through a pall of clouds and a low-hanging mist, suddenly fell as though exhausted across the asphalt path of the Embankment Gardens. A tall, gaunt young man, who had been seated with folded arms in the corner of one of the seats, stared at it as though bewildered. His eyes suddenly met those of a young lady in deep black, who was gazing about her in similar stupefaction. Almost at once, and with perfect spontaneity, she smiled upon him.

"But it is astonishing, this!" she exclaimed. "Sunshine in London--in January!"

The young man was a little confused. He was very diffident, and such lack of conventionality on the part of a perfect stranger surprised him.

"It is unusual," he admitted.

"It is a thing which I have never seen," she went on, dropping voice a little and glancing towards a bath-chair close at hand, in which an elderly and very delicate-looking old gentleman was muffled up in furs and apparently asleep. "It is something, even, for which I had not dared to hope. We seem so far here from everything that is bright and beautiful and cheerful."

Aaron Rodd, who was a shy and awkward being, felt unexpectedly at his ease. He was even anxious for further conversation. He had a rather long, pale face, with deep-set eyes and rugged features. He was soberly, even sombrely dressed in dismal black. He had the air of a recluse. Perhaps that was why the young lady smiled upon him with such confidence.

"You are not English?" he ventured.

She shook her head.

"What we are now, alas!" she sighed, glancing towards the bath-chair, "I scarcely know, for we have no country. Like every one else in such a plight, we come to England."

"It is your father who sleeps there?" he enquired.

"It is my grandfather," she told him. "Together--he and I and my brother--we have passed through terrible times. He has lost all power to sleep at night. In the daytime, when it does not rain, he is wheeled out here, and, if it is only not too cold, then he sleeps as he does now, and I watch."

"You are very young to have charge of him."

She smiled a little pitifully.

"One grows old so quickly in these terrible days! I am already twenty-one. But you," she went on--"see how inquisitive I am!--I saw you yesterday from the distance, seated here. There are nursemaids and queer fragments of humanity who seem to pass through these gardens and loiter, and sometimes there are those with affairs who go on their way. But you--what do you think of as you sit there? You are a writer, perhaps?"

He laughed a little harshly. His voice was not altogether pleasant.

"I am a lawyer," he declared, "without a practice. Sometimes the ghosts who call at my empty office stifle me and I come out here to escape from them."

"A lawyer? An avocat?" she repeated softly to herself.

Evidently she found something to interest her in the statement. She glanced towards the sleeping man. Then she came a little nearer. He was conscious of a very delightful and altogether un-English perfume, aware suddenly that her eyes were the colour of violets, framed underneath with deep but not unbecoming lines, that her mouth was curved in a fashion strange to him.

"Englishmen, they say, are so much to be trusted," she murmured, "and a lawyer, too..."