“I came here when I found you were trying to work the job as a one-man performance. I know you, Dan; you’ve got a mighty bad reputation amongst honest crooks.”
“I’m trying to live it down. Where has he gone--did he tell you he was leaving?”
“No; we’d given up confidences before he left. You said he would come back. I’ve got it in my bones that you’re right. I guess he got it.”
“But he couldn’t have worked a job like this single-handed,” said the other. “Why, your husband couldn’t have opened that safe more scientifically....”
She was not willing to be turned by gross flattery.
“Cut out the small talk and get right down to the grand facts of life,” she said briskly. “Did I find Selsbury and affinitize him or did I not? Did I....”
“‘Did I, didn’t I’--great Moses! Do I want all that stuff? Why did you allow him to come back here?”
“Let him come back?” she said scornfully. “I made him come back! When I got him into the house, I had him like that. I knew how you’d turn up. I knew there was money here, and I was going to stay with it. It’s a funny thing about me that, of all the affinities I’ve met, noth’n’ is quite so close as money. Noth’n’ understands me better or talks more like Governor George Demosthenes.”
The man was finished. He too was a philosopher.
“Well, there’s no help for it,” he said with a groan that he could not suppress. “We’ll have to share. The old terms, mind--none of your fifty-fifty stuff. Seventy-thirty.”
“Seventy-thirty! Well, I admire cold blood! It’s fifty-fifty or nothing with me, Dan. But there ain’t anything to share.”
“She’s paying up. I’ve given her back the cheque. If you wait half-an-hour she’ll have it cashed. Now are you satisfied? Sixty-forty?”
“Fifty-fifty!” said Heloise firmly. “You’d never forgive yourself if you gave me less.”
They wrangled for ten minutes; in the end Heloise gained a victory for principle.
Eleanor came furtively in search of her mistress and found her in Gordon’s room, valiantly overhauling his wardrobe.
“The clergyman, miss,” she said, with an air of mystery that was natural.
The well-trained servant has an air appropriate to the calling of every visitor. Dread and a funereal solemnity for doctors, a primness for elderly ladies, a suppressed blitheness to announce the young, mystery for the clergy; only a lawyer baffles interpretation. The secret dispositions of lawyers have never been probed.