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Geraldine Bonner
A Story of Bonanza Fortunes
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The girl opened the door, and he followed her into the parlor. It was a long room, divided in the middle by an archway, its lower end now veiled in shadow. On a large table another lamp glowed, a bunch of paper flowers hanging on one side of the globe to subdue the light. The room gave an impression of lofty emptiness. The footsteps of the visitor seemed to be flung back from its high, bare walls. The lamp struck gleams of light from the gilded frame of a large mirror over the chimney-piece, and here and there caught the running gold arabesques which covered the wall-paper. There were a few wicker chairs drawn up to the table, which was covered with the litter of amateur dressmaking. In the single upholstered chair that the room boasted sat Colonel Ramsay Reed.
With a loud exclamation of pleasure the colonel rose and greeted his guest. He was a remarkable-looking man of sixty-five or seventy, fully six feet in height, erect, alert, with a striking air of distinction in his narrow, hawk-featured face, and a gaunt, angular figure. His white hair flowed nearly to his shoulders, and his white mustache was in singular contrast to the brown and leathery surface of his thin cheeks. He wore a long wrapper of indeterminate hue, patched with materials of different colors and patterns, and a pair of old leather slippers that slipped off his heels when he walked. In his suave and urbane courtesy he seemed to be serenely indifferent to the deficiencies of his costume, folding his dressing-gown round his legs as he subsided into his chair with the deliberate ease that a Roman senator might have displayed in the arrangement of his toga of ceremony.
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