‘Excuse my emotion, Mr. Logan,’ he went on. ‘I shall be happy to see and arrange with this lady, who, I trust will, as my cousin, accept my hospitality at Rookchester. I shall be deeply interested, as you, no doubt, will also be, in the result of her researches into an affair which so closely concerns both you and me.’
He was silent again, musing deeply, while Logan marvelled more and more what his real original business might be. All this affair of the documents and the muniment-room had arisen by the merest accident, and would not have arisen if the Earl had found Merton at home. The Earl obviously had a difficulty in coming to the point: many clients had. To approach a total stranger on the most intimate domestic affairs (even if his ancestor and yours were in a big thing together three hundred years ago) is, to a sensitive patrician, no easy task. In fact, even members of the middle class were, as clients, occasionally affected by shyness.
‘Mr. Logan,’ said the Earl, ‘I am not a man of to-day. The cupidity of our age, the eagerness with which wealthy aliens are welcomed into our best houses and families, is to me, I may say, distasteful. Better that our coronets were dimmed than that they should be gilded with the gold eagles of Chicago or blazing with the diamonds of Kimberley. My feelings on this point are unusually—I do not think that they are unduly—acute.’
Logan murmured assent.
‘I am poor,’ said the Earl, with all the expansiveness of the shy; ‘but I never held what is called a share in my life.’
‘It is long,’ said Logan, with perfect truth, ‘since anything of that sort was in my own possession. In that respect my ’scutcheon, so to speak, is without a stain.’
‘How fortunate I am to have fallen in with one of sentiments akin to my own, unusual as they are!’ said the Earl. ‘I am a widower,’ he went on, ‘and have but one son and one daughter.’
‘He is coming to business now,’ thought Logan.
‘The former, I fear, is as good almost as affianced—is certainly in peril of betrothal—to a lady against whom I have not a word to say, except that she is inordinately wealthy, the sole heiress of—’ Here the Earl gasped, and was visibly affected. ‘You may have heard, sir,’ the patrician went on, ‘of a commercial transaction of nature unfathomable to myself—I have not sought for information,’ he waved his hand impatiently, ‘a transaction called a Straddle?’
Logan murmured that he was aware of the existence