At that moment the servant opened the door.
"Mr Titus Blackhurst, senior, to see you, sir."
Peake and his wife looked at one another in amazement, and Sneyd laughed quietly.
"He told me he should come up," Mrs Lovatt explained.
"Show him into the breakfast-room, Clara," said Mrs Peake to the servant.
Peake frowned angrily as he crossed the hall, but as he opened the breakfast-room door he contrived to straighten out his face into a semblance of urbanity. Though he could have enjoyed accelerating the passage of his visitor into the street, there were excellent commercial reasons why he should adopt a less strenuous means towards the end which he had determined to gain.
"Glad to see you, Mr Blackhurst," he began, a little awkwardly.
"You know, I suppose, what I've come for, Mr Peake," said the old man, in that rich, deep, oily voice of which Mrs Lovatt, in one of those graphic phrases that came to her sometimes, had once remarked that it must have been "well basted in the cooking."
"I suppose I do," Peake answered diffidently.
Mr Blackhurst took off a wrinkled black glove, stroked his grey beard, and started on a long account of the inception and progress of the organ scheme. Peake listened and was drawn into an admission that it was a good scheme and deserved to succeed. Mr Blackhurst then went on to make plain that it was in danger of utterly collapsing, that only one man of "our Methodist friends" could save it, and that both Mrs Sutton and Mrs Lovatt had advised him to come and make a personal appeal to that man.