“I say, Watkins, when Clancey calls about those trousers show him in, and send some one over to the packet-office about the phosphorus blacking; you know we are on the last jar of it. If the Solicitor-General should come—”
“He is here, sir; he has been waiting these twenty minutes. I told him you were with his Excellency.”
“So I was,—so I always am,” said he, throwing a half-smoked cigar into the fire. “Admit him.”
A pale, care-worn, anxious-looking man, whose face was not without traces of annoyance at the length of time he had been kept waiting, now entered and sat down.
“Just where we were yesterday, Pemberton,” said Balfour, as he rose and stood with his back to the fire, the tails of his gorgeous dressing-gown hanging over his arms. “Intractable as he ever was; he won't die, and he won't resign.”
“His friends say he is perfectly willing to resign if you agree to his terms.”
“That may be possible; the question is, What are his terms? Have you a precedent of a Chief Baron being raised to the peerage?”
“It's not, as I understand, the peerage he insists on; he inclines to a moneyed arrangement.”
“We are too poor, Pemberton,—we are too poor. There's a deep gap in our customs this quarter. It's reduction we must think of, not outlay.”
“If the changes are to be made,” said the other, with a tone of impatience, “I certainly ought to be told at once, or I shall have no time left for my canvass.”