"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she said, eyeing me coldly with a hitherto unexposed lorgnon.
"I am," said I. "You quite took me by surprise. I should have made myself more presentable if I had known—"
"Well, let's move on upstairs," said Rocksworth. Addressing the porters he said: "You fellows get this lot of stuff together and I'll take an option on it. I'll be over to-morrow to close the deal, Mr.—Mr.—Now, where is the old Florentine mirror the Count was telling us about?"
"The Count?" said I, frowning.
"Yes, the real owner. You can't stuff me with your talk about being the proprietor here, my friend. You see, we happen to know the Count."
They all condescended to laugh at me. I don't know what I should have said or done if Britton had not returned with a box of matches at that instant—sulphur matches which added subtly to the growing illusion.
Almost simultaneously there appeared in the lower hall a lanky youth of eighteen. He was a loud-voiced, imperious sort of chap with at least three rolls to his trousers and a plum-coloured cap.
"Say, these clubs are the real stuff, all right, all right. They're as brittle as glass. See what I did to 'em. We can hae 'em spliced and rewound and I'll hang 'em on my wall. All I want is the heads anyhow."
He held up to view a headless mid-iron and brassie, and triumphantly waved a splendid cleek. My favourite clubs! I could play better from a hanging lie with that beautiful brassie than with any club I ever owned and as for the iron, I was deadly with it.
He lit a cigarette and threw the match into a pile of shavings. Old Conrad returned to life at that instant and stamped out the incipient blaze.