The Black Abbot by Edgar Wallace — Read

Strange as it may seem, she had never visited her brother's office on High Holborn before she left her taxi at the door and came up in the elevator to his magnificent suite. Her appearance had a prosaic cause. She had left the country without a penny: a fact she did not realize till the ticket collector, working through the train, came into her compartment and aroused her from a daydream to the realization that she had neither ticket nor money to pay for it. She gave the man her card, and a taxi brought her to Holborn.

She was to have another novel experience. A tall, thick-set man, with iron-gray hair and a strong, attractive face, had come into the waiting room to meet her. She remembered him as the solitary fisherman who had sat fishing for hours on the bank of Ravensrill, without, apparently, catching anything. So this was the redoubtable Mr. Gilder of whom Arthur had so often spoken. She was not especially curious about him. He was a head clerk, and, by Arthur's account, a clever man at his work; but now that she saw him, she was impressed. He was distinctive -- outside of type. The average of humanity you may pass in the street without noticing. It would have been impossible to see Fabrian Gilder once without recognizing him instantly after the passage of years. The jaw was almost square, his big mouth was so tightly drawn that he seemed to be lipless; a powerful nose, a pair of penetrating gray eyes, under straggly, uneven eyebrows; this, and the breadth of his shoulders, conveyed an imponderable expression of power.