"Will you please to step this way?"
Mr. Hinchford turned, followed the usher to the end of the counting-house, passed through a room, where two or three gentlemen were busily writing, went through another door into a larger room, where one old gentleman—very like himself—was seated in all the divinity that doth hedge a principal.
"Good morning, James," was the banker's first remark, nodding his head familiarly in his brother's direction.
"Good morning, Geoffry."
And then there was a pause; the two men who had parted in anger nearly twenty-six years ago, and had not met since, looked at each other somewhat curiously. It was a strange meeting, and a strange commencement thereto, a little affected on the part of the banker, the senior by eight years. In the same room together, the likeness between them was singularly apparent—the height, figure, features, even the scanty crop of white hair, were all identical; but in the senior's face there was expressed a vigour and determination, which in Sid's father was wholly wanting. Geoffry Hinchford was still the cool, calculating man of business, who let no chance slip, and who fought for his chances, and held his place with younger men.
There was no sentiment in the meeting of the brothers, and yet each was moved and touched by the changes time had made. They had parted in the prime of life, stalwart, handsome men, and they came face to face in their senility.
"Take a seat," said Geoffry Hinchford, indicating one with the feather of the quill pen he held in his hand.
The brother took a chair with a grave inclination of the head, and then crossed his hands upon his stick, and began to evidence a little of that nervousness that had beset him before he entered the banking-house. Geoffry Hinchford's keen eyes detected this, and he hastened to avoid one of those scenes which he had confessed to his nephew he hated, when he made his first and last call in Great Suffolk Street.
"You have been walking fast, James; will you look at the Times a bit, and compose yourself. That's the money article."
He passed the paper over to his brother, and then began making a few entries in a small pocket volume before him—a hybrid book, with a lock and key. Mr. Hinchford turned the paper over in his hands, inspected the money article upside down, and appeared interested in it from that point of view—gave a furtive tug to his stock, which he was sure Sid, who always buttoned it, had taken in a hole too much, and then mustered up courage to begin the subject which had brought him thither.