However, he had seen that in Mrs. Cecil's eye which brooked no disobedience, and so he guided his bays southward through the city, by wide thoroughfares and narrow, past crowding wagons and jangling street cars, till he turned into the densely packed street his lady had designated.
"Kidder & Kidder" were her men of business. He knew that. There had been no time, for years upon years, when a firm of this same name had not served the owners of Bellevieu. The first lawyer of that race had handed down the business to his heirs, as the first tenant of the rich estate had willed that to his. But it was now more common for the lady of the mansion to send for her advisers to visit her, than for her to visit them; and that there was something unusual in her present business both her old servitors realized.
It was something worth while to see how the elder Mr. Kidder, himself an octogenarian, retaining an almost youthful vigor, rose and salaamed, as this beautiful old gentlewoman, followed by her gray-haired maid in spotless attire, entered his rather dingy office. How the old-time courtesies were exchanged between these remnants of an earlier society, when brusqueness was considered ill-bred and suavity the mark of good blood.
A few such greetings past, and the old lawyer conducted his distinguished client into an inner room, exclusively his own, leaving Dinah to wait without, and whence the pair soon emerged; the lady urging: "You will kindly attend to it at once, please;" and he answering, with equal earnestness: "Immediately, Madam."
Then he escorted her to her carriage and stood bareheaded while she entered it: each courteously saluting the other as it rolled away, and he returning to his office with a look of anxiety on his fine face, as there was one of relief on hers.
"Well, I've done the best I could—now!" she exclaimed, after a time. "I've never entrusted any matter to Kidder & Kidder that did not end satisfactorily. That old firm is a rock in the midst of this shifting modernity!"
To which Dinah, not comprehending, replied with her usual:
"Yas'm. I spec' dat's so, honey, Miss Betty."
That evening both Ephraim and the maid, sitting under their own back porch, exchanged speculations concerning their lady's morning trip, and her subsequent quietude during the whole day.
"I 'low 'twas anudder will, our Miss Betty, she done get made. Dat's what dem lawyer gentlemen is most inginerally for. How many dem wills has she had writ, a'ready, Dinah?" queried Ephraim.