Can you direct me to a hotel?"
"Hotel? Nonsense." Mr. Windlebird spoke in the bluff, breezy voice
which at many a stricken board-meeting had calmed frantic shareholders
as if by magic. "You're coming right into my house and up to bed this
instant."
It was not till he was between the sheets with a hot-water bottle at
his toes and a huge breakfast inside him that Roland learned the name
of his good Samaritan. When he did, his first impulse was to struggle
out of bed and make his escape. Geoffrey Windlebird's was a name which
he had learned, in the course of his mercantile career, to hold in
something approaching reverence as that of one of the mightiest
business brains of the age.
To have to meet so eminent a man in the capacity of invalid, a nuisance
about the house, was almost too much for Roland's shrinking nature. The
kindness of the Windlebirds--and there seemed to be nothing that they
were not ready to do for him--distressed him beyond measure. To have a
really great man like Geoffrey Windlebird sprawling genially over his
bed, chatting away as if he were an ordinary friend, was almost
horrible.
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