'What th' old folks lose,' murmured Meshach, apparently to the fire, as he put his half-consumed cigar into a meerschaum holder, 'goes to the profit of young Burgess, as is waiting outside the Bank at top o' th' Square.'
'I see,' said Twemlow, and thought primly that in his day such laxities were not permitted.
Hannah and the servant cleared the tea-table, and the two men were left alone, each silently reducing an J.S. Murias to ashes. Meshach seemed to grow smaller in his padded chair by the hob, to become torpid, and to lose that keen sense of his own astuteness which alone gave zest to his life. Arthur stared out of the window at the confined backyard. The autumn dusk thickened.
Suddenly Meshach sprang up and lighted the gas, and as he adjusted the height of the flame, he remarked casually: 'So your sister Alice is as poorly off as ever?'
Twemlow assented with a nod. 'By the way,' he said, 'you told me on Wednesday you had something interesting to show me.'
Meshach made no answer, but picked up the poker and struck several times a large pewter platter on the mantelpiece.
'Do you want anything, brother?' said Hannah, hastening into the room.
'Go up into my bedroom, sister, and in the left-hand pigeon-hole in the bureau you'll see a little flat tissue-paper parcel. Bring it me. It's marked J.S.'
'Yes, brother,' and she departed.
'You said as your father had told your sister as he never got no more than two hundred a year from th' partnership after he retired.'