Her eyes wandered about the unchanged scene, and into the equally familiar bedroom beyond--the “best spare-room” of old days. There hung the same red-eyed Beatrice Cenci above the double bed. John Clephane’s parents had travelled in the days when people still brought home copies of the Old Masters; and a mixture of thrift and filial piety had caused John Clephane to preserve their collection in the obscurer corners of his house. Kate smiled at the presiding genius selected to guard the slumbers of married visitors (as Ribera monks and Caravaggio gamblers darkened the digestive processes in the dining-room); she smiled, as she so often had--but now without bitterness--at the naïve incongruities of that innocent and inquisitorial past. Then her eye lit on the one novelty in the room: the telephone at her elbow. Oh, to talk to some one--to talk to Fred Landers, instantly! “There are too many things I don’t know ... I’m too utterly in the dark,” she murmured. She rushed through the directory, found his number, and assailed his parlour-maid with questions. But Mr. Landers was not at home; the parlour-maid’s inflexion signified: “At this hour?” and a glance at the clock showed Kate that the endless day had barely reached mid-afternoon. Of course he would not be at home. But the parlour-maid added: “He’s always at his office till five.” His office! Fred Landers had an office--had one still! Kate remembered that two-and-twenty years ago, after lunching with them, he used always to glance at his watch and say: “Time to get back to the office.” And he was well-off--always had been. He needn’t--needn’t! What on earth did he do there, she wondered? What results, pecuniary or other, had he to show for his quarter-century of “regular hours”? She remembered that his profession had been legal--most of one’s men friends, in those remote days, were lawyers. But she didn’t fancy he had ever appeared in court; people consulted him about investments, he looked after estates. For the last years, very likely, his chief business had been to look after Anne’s; no doubt he was one of John Clephane’s executors, and also old Mrs. Clephane’s. One pictured him as deeply versed in will-making and will-interpreting: he had always, in his dry mumbling way, rather enjoyed a quibble over words. Kate thought, by the way, that he mumbled less, spoke more “straight from the shoulder,” than he used to. Perhaps it was experience, authority, the fact of being consulted and looked up to, that had changed the gaunt shambling Fred Landers of old days into the four-square sort of man who had met her on the pier and disentangled her luggage with so little fuss. Oh, yes, she was sure the new Fred Landers could help her--advice was just what she wanted, and what, she suspected, he liked to give. She called up his office, and in less than a minute there was his calm voice asking what he could do. “Come at once--oh, Fred, you must!”