“Here it is,—at least, so far as I was able to make it. Many of our memoranda, however, only refer to verbal arrangements, and allude to business matters transacted personally between you and Mr. Carew.”
“Listen to him, Crowther; just hear what he says,” said Fagan, angrily. “Is not that a satisfactory way to keep accounts?”
“Gently, gently; let us go quietly to work,” said Crowther, a large, fat, unwieldy man, with a bloated, red face, and an utterance rendered difficult from the combined effects of asthma and over-eating. “Raper is generally most correct, and your own memory is admirable. If Miss Polly will give me a cup of her strongest tea, without any sugar, I 'll answer for it I 'll soon see my way.”
When Raper had deposited the mass of papers on the table, and presented the cup of tea to Crowther, he stole, half timidly, over to where Polly sat.
“You must be hungry, Papa Joe,”—it was the name by which she called him in infancy,—“for you never appeared at dinner. Pray eat something now.”
“I have no appetite, Polly,—that is, I have eaten already. I 'm quite refreshed,” said he, scarcely thinking of what he said, for his eyes were directed to the table where Crowther was seated, and where a kind of supercilious smile on the attorney's face seemed evoked by something in the papers before him.
“Some cursed folly of his own,—some of that blundering nonsense that he fills his brains with!” cried Fagan, as he threw indignantly away a closely written sheet of paper, the lines of which unmistakably proclaimed verse.
Joe eyed the unhappy document wistfully for a second or two, and then, with a stealthy step, he crept over, and threw it into the hearth.
“I found out the passage, Polly,” said he, in a whisper, so as not to disturb the serious conference of the others; and he drew a few well-thumbed leaves from his pocket, and placed them beside her, while she bent over them till her glossy ringlets touched the page.
“This is the Medea,” said she; “but we have not read that yet.”