"It is more than difficult," said Blümenlein; "it is, to my mind, impossible to believe in so monstrous an anomaly as that sordid life endured for nearly ten years by such a temperament as that which the photograph indicates. I am something of a physiognomist, and I think I know what that face means; if faces have any meaning whatever. It means strong feeling, a fervid imagination, a mind that could not be satisfied with the triumphs of successful finance. It means a nature in which the heart must have fair play. Whatever Julian Wyllard's life may have appeared in the eyes of the men with whom he had business relations--however he may have contrived to pass for the serious genius of finance, old before his time, the embodiment of abstruse calculations and far-seeing policy--be sure that the life was not a barren life, and that fiery passions were factors in the sum of that existence."
"But his life seems to have been patent to all the world."
"Yes, Mr. Heathcote, the life he led in public. But who knows how he may have plunged into the dissipations of Paris after office hours? That little door in the alcove has its significance, you may be sure. I made light of it in Mrs. Wyllard's presence, for I know that women are jealous even of the past. Why should I deprive her of the pleasure of considering her husband a model of propriety, in the remote past as well as in the present? I affected--for that dear lady's sake--to believe the side door the work of a prior tenant to Mr. Wyllard. But I happen to have documentary evidence that Mr. Wyllard had the door made for him in the third year of his tenancy. I found the receipted account of the builder who made it, among some papers left by my predecessor at the back of a cupboard."
"Then you think that Wyllard was a man with two faces?"
"I do," replied Blümenlein: "I think that Wyllard, the speculator and financier, was one man--but that there was another man of whose life the world knew nothing, and who went out and came in between dusk and dawn by that side door in the court."