‘You know where they are,’ he said ‘Why don’t you get at ‘em?’
VI
About noon on the following day Mr. Steinberg, seated in a small inner chamber in Hatton Garden, leisurely answering his sole business correspondent of that morning, was in no way surprised when the boy he employed to open the door and receive visitors brought in a card bearing the name of ‘Mr. John Barter, jun.’
‘Show him in,’ said Mr. Steinberg; and young Mr. Barter, hearing this in the outer room, came in with a pale-faced and excited alacrity. The diamond merchant dismissed the boy with a word.
‘Well,’ he said, turning the tip of his cigar upwards by a protrusion of the under lip, ‘what is it?’
‘About that little matter,’ said young Barter nervously, ‘we were talking of last night.’
‘The little matter we were talking of last night?’ asked Steinberg idly, looking at him with half-shut eyes. ‘That hundred you owe me?’
‘Well, perhaps that afterwards,’ said Barter with a frightened breathless laugh in his voice. ‘But about the other matter first.’
‘The other matter?’ Steinberg asked, in a lazier manner than before. ‘What other matter?’ He took up his pen, dipped it in the inkstand before him, and tracing a line or two of his correspondent’s communication with it, turned to his own unfinished letter.