Another year had passed in this way; Leonetta had by now become, according to the domesticity school reports, an accomplished housekeeper, and, as a girl of seventeen, was on her way home. Coming home!--Cleopatra had dwelt on this homecoming every wakeful hour of the last thirty days, and again she felt that pang, or pain, or strange convulsion of the heart, which she loathed because it humiliated her, and which she combated because it threatened to master her. Thus did Cleopatra meditate over her lot as she examined her fine, strong, disengaged hand, as she sat in the study on that afternoon in June; and Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_ had little to offer her either in comfort or enlightenment. It was a fine hand she looked at. The fingers were well-shaped, long and even, without any of those thicknesses at the joints which so often mar the beauty of hands even in men. The finger-nails were not too long, and there was a sort of "well-upholstered" fulness of the fingers and palm which spoke of health and latent efficiency. It was not a small hand, or in any case, not too small a hand, and on the inside it possessed those soft corrugations that denote artistic sensibilities. CHAPTER III The central offices of Bullion and Bullion Ltd. were in Lombard Street. They occupied a large building constructed of ferroconcrete, on each floor of which, except the first, there was accommodation for hundreds of clerks. The room occupied by Sir Joseph Bullion, on the first floor, was one of those apartments with very tall mantelpieces and enormous windows, which seem to have been designed for a race of giants. Certainly Sir Joseph himself, unless he had climbed on a chair, could never have rested his elbow against the mantelpiece, nor could he have deposited his cigar thereon without an unusually strenuous effort. The remaining appointments of the room, except for two or three exquisite Stuart cabinets and some priceless old masters on the walls, were designed on the same scale. Sir Joseph's own table, for instance, though of normal height, looked as if it might have been purchased by the acre, while the carpet, a huge Turkey, presented an enormously long pile, as soft as moss, to the feet. Even the chair on which the head of the firm sat was exceptionally large, and seemed to offer its occupant the constant alternative of definitely selecting either one or the other side of the extensive surface which lay between its arms. Opposite him at a smaller table sat his chief private secretary, Denis Malster, a pale, clean-shaven, intelligent-looking young man, with mouse-coloured hair, grey eyes, and somewhat thin lips. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne must have been right about his sense of humour, for a pleasant twinkle played about his eyes, even while he was at work, which gave him the air of one amused by what he was doing.