I don't quite feel myself today."
"Perhaps you'd better," recommended Roger, taking the roll of maps under
his arm. "I'll have these distributed from my office during the week."
"No, nothing special," answered Truesdale; "I just happened in. And I
think," he added to himself, "that I had better lose no time in happening
out. The idea of my running up against such a tar-kettle as this! Pouf!"
As he went out he passed along the front of Belden's desk. Belden himself
sat there attended, with the sort of deferential familiarity that
suggests the confidential clerk, by the Swiss, the Alsacian, or whatever
else, who on a previous occasion had moved the curiosity of Bingham.
This man caught sight of Truesdale as he passed, and gave him an instant
glance of recognition. He at once bowed his head over Belden's desk, so
as to hide his face among its papers. "A gentleman to see you sir?" he
suggested with a magnificent readiness.
Belden raised his own head and met the careless nod of the passing
Truesdale with a forbidding frown. "No, he doesn't want to see me. And I
don't want to see him," he muttered in a lower tone.
"You know him--is it not so?" the man insisted, with a kind of smothered
determination.
"Know him? Yes"--with extreme distaste. "It's young Marshall."
"Mr. Marshall's son?"
"Yes," Belden thrust some papers towards him. "Take these as you go."
The man put out his hand. "I know him, I myself, also," he said, looking
Belden full in the face with a steady eye.
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