A fortnight later Mr. Ferguson, the lawyer, received a telegram which put him into a fluster. He was an old gentleman nowadays and liable to excitement. He sent for his head clerk, not that pertinacious servant, Mr. Gregory—he had long since gone into retirement—but another, from whom Mr. Ferguson was not inclined to stand any nonsense.
“I shall want to-morrow all the necessary forms for securing English nationality,” he said, “and please get me Colonel Vanderfelt on the trunk line.”
The clerk went out of the office. The old man sat in a muse, looking out of the window upon the plane trees in the Square. So here was Virginia Ravenel’s son coming home, invalided, with a wife. How the years did fly, to be sure! Yet though the plane trees were a little dim to his eyes, he heard a voice, fresh as the morning, through that dusty room, and saw the Opera House at Covent Garden with people wearing the strange dress of thirty years ago.
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.
Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Winding Stair, by A. E. W. Mason
