This house was in a wide, quiet street of the silent country town, where the grass sprouted about the cobbles in the roads. A parlourmaid conducted Hugh into a prim library, where he was almost immediately joined by a little man, dressed with extreme neatness, and wearing thick glass spectacles, who met him with repeated little bows.
“A friend of my late client,” he said, insisting upon Hugh’s seating himself in a huge arm-chair, like a dentist’s. “Yes, yes.” (He referred to Hugh’s card that he was holding between his finger and thumb.) “My name is Moffatt. I have always acted for Sir Roderick. Dear me! Very sad, very sad! I only heard of his death this morning.”
He sat down and looked at Hugh through his spectacles with an inquiring, owl-like gaze.
“I have good reason to suppose that my client has spoken of you to me as having treated him very successfully after his accident,” he next said, taking off his spectacles and absently polishing them with his handkerchief. “Quite in a friendly way—Sir Roderick was very friendly with us; indeed he has often honoured Mrs. Moffatt by taking a bit of luncheon with us. And how is the poor young lady?”
To Hugh’s surprise, he found that Mr. Moffatt had never seen Lilia.
“Our poor friend—my late client, I should say—was slightly eccentric, you see,” said the lawyer exculpatingly, after which Hugh found it easier to make a clean breast of affairs as they stood.
“Mr. Mervyn advised me to come to you to tell me exactly what to do,” he said.
“Certainly, certainly, Mr. Paull, anything that we can do.”
The little gentleman, who had been mentally casting up Hugh, of whose position in Sir Roderick’s will he was well aware, was so far satisfied with his new client. The reluctance Hugh showed, during their ensuing interview, to accept the situation, he thought foolish. Still, he liked the young man for it.
Hugh left him in a more uncertain mood than when he sought him.