“But I mustn’t keep him waiting too long,” said Fledgeby, “or he’ll revenge it on my unfortunate friend. How’s your very clever and agreeable wife? She knows we have broken down?”

“I showed her the letter.”

“Very much surprised?” asked Fledgeby.

“I think she would have been more so,” answered Lammle, “if there had been more go in you?”

“Oh! — She lays it upon me, then?”

“Mr. Fledgeby, I will not have my words misconstrued.”

“Don’t break out, Lammle,” urged Fledgeby, in a submissive tone, “because there’s no occasion. I only asked a question. Then she don’t lay it upon me? To ask another question.”

“No, sir.”

“Very good,” said Fledgeby, plainly seeing that she did. “My compliments to her. Good-bye!”

They shook hands, and Lammle strode out pondering. Fledgeby saw him into the fog, and returning to the fire and musing with his face to it, stretched the legs of the rose-coloured Turkish trousers wide apart, and meditatively bent his knees, as if he were going down upon them.

“You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,” murmured Fledgeby, “and which money can’t produce; you are boastful of your manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I’ll bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,” here he rubbed the places where they were due, “and no manners, and no conversation!”

Having thus relieved his noble mind, he collected the legs of the Turkish trousers, straightened himself on his knees, and called out to Riah in the next room, “Halloa, you sir!” At sight of the old man re-entering with a gentleness monstrously in contrast with the character he had given him, Mr. Fledgeby was so tickled again, that he exclaimed, laughing, “Good! Good! Upon my soul it is uncommon good!”

“Now, old ’un,” proceeded Fledgeby, when he had had his laugh out, “you’ll buy up these lots that I mark with my pencil — there’s a tick there, and a tick there, and a tick there — and I wager two-pence you’ll afterwards go on squeezing those Christians like the Jew you are. Now, next you’ll want a cheque — or you’ll say you want it, though you’ve capital enough somewhere, if one only knew where, but you’d be peppered and salted and grilled on a gridiron before you’d own to it — and that cheque I’ll write.”

When he had unlocked a drawer and taken a key from it to open another drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which was the cheque book; and when he had written the cheque; and when, reversing the key and drawer process, he had placed his cheque book in safety again; he beckoned the old man, with the folded cheque, to come and take it.

“Old ’un,” said Fledgeby, when the Jew had put it in his pocket-book, and was putting that in the breast of his outer garment; “so much at present for my affairs. Now a word about affairs that are not exactly mine. Where is she?”

With his hand not yet withdrawn from the breast of his garment, Riah started and paused.

“Oho!” said Fledgeby. “Didn’t expect it! Where have you hidden her?”

Showing that he was taken by surprise, the old man looked at his master with some passing confusion, which the master highly enjoyed.