"I can see the old gentleman now. He was sitting there where Miss Cooper is, his chin on his breast, and from time to time he would take me in with a look from beneath his gathered brows, which, for sheer, downright hyperborean iciness, had a Dakota blizzard backed away down to the equator and stewing in its own perspiration. I was afraid to say anything more, and at the same time I was wild with impatience to get some inkling of what was going on behind his impassive crust.
"And, Swift, you never, never could guess how that silence was broken. He suddenly tossed his head back, and burst out with a great guffaw of laughter. I jumped clear out of my chair.
"'What a nephew!' he cried, while I stood staring at him in dumb astonishment. 'Good Lord, what I 've missed by not knowing you all these years! A chip off of the old block!' He abruptly squared round on me, and paid me a compliment very similar to one I had heard a few nights before.
"'See here, my boy,' said he, admiringly, 'for pure and unlimited cheek, you 're in a class by yourself. Why, the very audacity of your impudence is not without its attraction! Here you come into my house and ask me to stand and deliver a fortune, with all the light and airy assurance of a bill-collector. And the best of it is that you are dead in earnest, too—oh, Lord!' And he went off into another gale of laughter.
"I here timidly mentioned the fact that I had never in my life been more dead in earnest.
"'Earnest!' he barked at me. 'D' ye suppose I can't tell when a man means what he says? Humph!
"'But see here, my lad, it's a pity we were n't drawn together years ago,' he broke off to snap at me. 'Sit down! I 'm not going to bite—if I am a "hound."'
"Well! I dropped back into my chair, where I sat blinking, a good deal bewildered, realizing only dimly that I had not been thrown bodily from the house, and, after a while, that he was not even angry.
"On the contrary, he seemed to be in the best of spirits. Presently he began to put me through a cross-examination, which I can recommend as a model for any one to follow who wants to elicit the minutiae of detail of another fellow's life.
"Before he finished, he had dragged out everything that had ever occurred to me with which anybody bearing the name of Fluette was even remotely associated—a complete history of Belle's and my acquaintance, everything I knew or had ever heard about Mrs. Fluette, all about Genevieve, and every word that I could remember that had ever passed between Mr. Fluette and myself.