“Look here,” said Wimsey, “here’s half a crown—thirty pennies, you know. Any use to you?”
The child promptly proved her kinship with humanity. She became abashed in the presence of wealth, and was silent, rubbing one dusty shoe upon the calf of her stocking.
“You appear,” pursued Lord Peter, “to be able to keep your young friends in order if you choose. I take you, in fact, for a woman of character. Very well, if you keep them from touching my car while I’m in the house, you get this half-crown, see? But if you let ’em blow the horn, I shall hear it. Every time the horn goes, you lose a penny, got that? If the horn blows six times, you only get two bob. If I hear it thirty times, you don’t get anything. And I shall look out from time to time, and if I see anybody mauling the car about or sitting in it, then you don’t get anything. Do I make myself clear?”
“I takes care o’ yer car fer ’arf a crahn. An’ ef the ’orn goes, you docks a copper ’orf of it.”
“That’s right.”
“Right you are, mister. I’ll see none on ’em touches it.”
“Good girl. Now, sir.”
The spectacled young man led them into a gloomy little waiting-room, suggestive of a railway station and hung with Old Testament prints.
“I’ll tell Mr. Dawson you’re here,” said he, and vanished, with the volume of theology still clutched in his hand.
Presently a shuffling step was heard on the coconut matting, and Wimsey and Parker braced themselves to confront the villainous claimant.