The angel of the Lord was not a scruffy little man, as it turned out; and his hat was a regrettably continental affair of felt with a tightly rolled brim turned up all round. He arrived at Blair, Hayward, and Bennet’s about half-past eleven the following morning.

“Mr. Robert,” old Mr. Heseltine said, putting his head in at Robert’s door, “there’s a Mr. Lange in the office to see you. He ——”

Robert, who was busy, and not expecting angels of the Lord, and quite used to strangers turning up in the office and wanting to see him, said: “What does he want? I’m busy.”

“He didn’t say. He just said he would like to see you if you were not too busy.”

“Well, I’m scandalously busy. Find out tactfully what he wants, will you? If it is nothing important Nevil can deal with it.”

“Yes, I’ll find out; but his English is very thick, and he doesn’t seem very willing to ——”

“English? You mean, he has a lisp?”

“No, I mean his pronunciation of English isn’t very good. He ——”

“The man’s a foreigner, you mean?”

“Yes. He comes from Copenhagen.”

“Copenhagen! Why didn’t you tell me that before!”

“You didn’t give me a chance, Mr. Robert.”

“Show him in, Timmy, show him in. Oh, merciful Heaven, do fairy-tales come true?”

Mr. Lange was rather like one of the Norman pillars of Notre Dame. Just as round, just as high, just as solid and just as dependable-looking. Far away at the top of this great round solid erect pillar his face shone with friendly rectitude.

“Mr. Blair?” he said. “My name is Lange. I apologise for bothering you”— he failed to manage the TH—“but it was important. Important to you, I mean. At least, yes I think.”

“Sit down, Mr. Lange.”

“Thank you, thank you. It is warm, is it not? This is perhaps the day you have your summer?” He smiled on Robert. “That is an idiom of the English, that joke about one-day summer. I am greatly interested in the English idiom. It is because of my interest in English idiom that I come to see you.”

Robert’s heart sank to his heels with the plummet swoop of an express lift. Fairy-tales, indeed. No; fairy-tales stay fairy-tales.

“Yes?” he said encouragingly.

“I keep a hotel in Copenhagen, Mr. Blair. The hotel of the Red Shoes it is called. Not, of course, because anyone wears red shoes there but because of a tale of Andersen, which you perhaps may ——”

“Yes, yes,” Robert said. “It has become one of our tales too.”

“Ah, so! Yes. A great man, Andersen. So simple a man and now so international. It is a thing to marvel at. But I waste your time, Mr. Blair, I waste your time. What was I saying?”

“About English idiom.”

“Ah, yes. To study English is my hubby.”

“Hobby,” Robert said, involuntarily.

“Hobby. Thank you. For my bread and butter I keep a hotel — and because my father and his father kept one before me — but for a hub . . . a hobby? yes; thank you — for a hobby I study the idiomatic English. So every day the newspapers that they leave about are brought to me.”

“They?”

“The English visitors.”

“Ah, yes.”

“In the evening, when they have retired, the page collects the English papers and leaves them in my office. I am busy, often, and I do not have time to look at them, and so they go into the pile and when I have leisure I pick one up and study it. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Blair?”

“Perfectly, perfectly, Mr. Lange.” A faint hope was rising again. Newspapers?

“So it goes on. A few moments of leisure, a little reading in an English paper, a new idiom — perhaps two — all very without excitement. How do you say that?”

“Placid.”

“So. Placid. And then one day I take this paper from the pile, just as I might take any of the others, and I forget all about idiom.” He took from his capacious pocket a once-folded copy of the Ack–Emma, and spread it in front of Robert on the desk. It was the issue of Friday, May the 10th, with the photograph of Betty Kane occupying two-thirds of the page. “I look at this photograph. Then I look inside and read the story. Then I say to myself that this is most extraordinary. Most extraordinary it is. The paper say this is the photograph of Betty Kann. Kann?”

“Kane.”

“Ah. So. Betty Kane. But it is also the photograph of Mrs. Chadwick, who stay at my hotel with her husband.”

“What!”

Mr. Lange looked pleased. “You are interested? I so hoped you might be. I did so hope.”

“Go on. Tell me.”

“A fortnight they stayed with me. And it was most extraordinary, Mr. Blair, because while that poor girl was being beaten and starved in an English attic, Mrs. Chadwick was eating like a young wolf at my hotel — the cream that girl could eat, Mr. Blair, even I, a Dane, was surprised — and enjoying herself very much.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I said to myself: It is after all a photograph. And although it is just the way she looked when she let down her hair to come to the ball ——”

“Let it down!”

“Yes. She wore her hair brushed up, you see. But we had a ball with costume —— Costume?”

“Yes. Fancy dress.”

“Ah. So. Fancy dress. And for her fancy dress she lets her hair hang down. Just like that there.” He tapped the photograph. “So I say to myself: It is a photograph, after all. ............