“I suppose he wants to claim kinship and all that sort of thing for society's sake?”
“I do not think so,” said the solicitor dryly. “I suggested an interview with you, but he seemed to think it quite unnecessary, if I could give him the information he required.”
“Ha!” said Sir Edward promptly, “we'll invite him here. Lady Atherly can bring in some people to see him. Is he—ahem—What is he like? The usual American, I suppose?”
“Not at all. Quite foreign-looking—dark, and rather like an Italian. There is no resemblance to Mr. Philip,” he said, glancing at the painting of a flaxen-haired child fondling a greyhound under the elms of Ashley Park.
“Ah! Yes, yes! Perhaps the mother was one of those Southern creoles, or mulattoes,” said Sir Edward with an Englishman's tolerant regard for the vagaries of people who were clearly not English; “they're rather attractive women, I hear.”
“I think you do quite well to be civil to him,” said the solicitor. “He seems to take an interest in the family, and being rich, and apparently only anxious to enhance the family prestige, you ought to know him. Now, in reference to those mortgages on Appleby Farm, if you could get”—
“Yes, yes!” said Sir Edward quickly; “we'll have him down here; and, I say! YOU'LL come too?”
The solicitor bowed. “And, by the way,” continued Sir Edward, “there was a girl too,—wasn't there? He has a sister, I believe?”
“Yes, but he has left her in America.”
“Ah, yes!—very good—yes!—of course. We'll have Lord Greyshott and Sir Roger and old Lady Everton,—she knows all about Sir Ashley and the family. And—er—is he young or old?”