thumping of his heart sounded to him as if workmen were mending the street outside. How beautiful she looked, with that red hair peeping out beneath her hat and … However!
“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked in the sort of voice Widgery might have used. Sam always pictured Widgery as a small man with bushy eyebrows, a thin face, and a voice like a rusty file.
“Well, I really wanted to see Sir Mallaby.”
“My father has been called away on important business to Walton Heath. Cannot I act as his substitute?”
“Do you know anything about the law?”
“Do I know anything about the law!” echoed Sam, amazed. “Do I know—! Why, I was reading my Widgery on Nisi Prius Evidence when you came in.”
“Oh, were you?” said Billie interested. “Do you always read on the floor.”
“I told you I dropped my pen,” said Sam coldly.
“And of course you couldn’t read without that! Well, as a matter of fact, this has nothing to do with Nisi—what you said.”
“I have not specialised exclusively on Nisi Prius Evidence. I know the law in all its branches.”
“Then what would you do if a man insisted on playing the orchestrion when you wanted to get to sleep?”
“The orchestrion?”
“Yes.”
“The orchestrion, eh? Ah! H’m!” said Sam.
“You still haven’t made it quite clear,” said Billie.
“I was thinking.”
“Oh, if you want to think!”
“Tell me the facts,” said Sam.
“Well, Mr. Mortimer and my father have taken a house together in the country, and for some reason or other they have quarrelled, and now Mr. Mortimer is doing everything he can to make father uncomfortable. Yesterday afternoon father wanted to sleep, and Mr. Mortimer started his orchestrion just to annoy him.”
“I think—I’m not quite sure—I think that’s a tort,” said Sam.
“A what?”
“Either a tort or a misdemeanour.”
“Why, you do know something about it after all!” cried Billie, startled into a sort of friendliness in spite of herself. And at the words and the sight of her quick smile Sam’s professional composure reeled on its foundations. He had half risen, with the purpose of springing up and babbling of the passion that consumed him, when the chill reflection came to him that this girl had once said that she considered him ridiculous. If he let himself go, would she not continue to think him ridiculous? He sagged back into his seat and at that moment there came another tap on the door which, opening, revealed the sinister face of the holiday-making Peters.
“Good morning, Mr. Samuel,” said Jno. Peters. “Good morning, Miss Milliken. Oh!”
He vanished as abruptly as he had appeared. He perceived that what he had taken at first glance for the stenographer was a client, and that the junior partner was engaged on a business conference. He left behind him a momentary silence.
“What a horrible-looking man!” said Billie, breaking it with a little gasp. Jno. Peters often affected the opposite sex like that at first sight.
“I beg your pardon?” said Sam absently.
“What a dreadful-looking man! He quite frightened me!”
For some moments Sam sat without speaking. If this had not been one of his Napoleonic mornings, no doubt the sudden arrival of his old friend, Mr. Peters, whom he had imagined at his home in Putney packing for his trip to America, would have suggested nothing to him. As it was it suggested a great deal. He had had a brain-wave, and for fully a minute he sat tingling under its impact. He was not a young man who often had brain-waves, and, when they came, they made him rather dizzy.
“Who is he?” asked Billie. “He seemed to know you? And who,” she demanded after a slight pause, “is Miss Milliken?”
Sam drew a deep breath.
“It’s rather a sad story,” he said. “His name is John Peters. He used to be clerk here.”
“But isn’t he any longer?”
“No.” Sam shook his head. “We had to get rid of him.”
“I don’t wonder. A man looking like that….”
“It wasn’t that so much,” said Sam. “The thing that annoyed father was that he tried to shoot Miss Milliken.”
Billie uttered a cry of horror!
“He tried to shoot Miss Milliken!”
“He did shoot her—the third time,” said Sam warming to his work. “Only in the arm, fortunately,” he added. “But my father is rather a stern disciplinarian and he had to go. I mean, we couldn’t keep him after that.”
