‘Can’t be managed under double the money, my good sir,’ observed Scawthorne, with unmistakable seriousness. ‘Worth your while, I promise you. Have another glass. Fair commission. Think it over.’
‘Look here! I shall have to make the girl an allowance.’
‘There’s the filter-works. Don’t be stingy.’
Joseph was growing very red in the face. He drank glass after glass; he flung his arms about; he capered.
‘Damn me if you shall call me that, Scaw! Two hundred it shall be. But what was the old cove up to? Why did he destroy the other will? What would the new one have been?’
‘Can’t answer either question, but it’s probably as well for you that to-morrow never comes.’
‘Now just see how things turn out!’ went on the other, in the joy of his heart. ‘All the thought and the trouble that I’ve gone through this last year, when I might have taken it easy and waited for chance to make me rich! Look at Kirkwood’s business. There was you and me knocking our heads together and raising lumps on them, as you may say, to find out a plan of keeping him and Jane apart, when all the while we’d nothing to do but to look on and wait, if only we’d known. Now this is what I call the working of Providence, Scawthorne. Who’s going to say after this, that things ain’t as they should be? Everything’s for the best, my boy; I see that clearly enough.’
‘Decidedly,’ assented Scawthorne, with a smile. ‘The honest man is always rewarded in the long run. And that reminds me; I too have had a stroke of luck.’
He went on to relate that his position in the office of Percival & Peel was now nominally that of an articled clerk, and that in three years’ time, if all went well, he would be received in the firm as junior partner.
‘There’s only one little project I am sorry to give up, in connection with your affairs, Snowdon. If it had happened that your daughter had inherited the money, why shouldn’t I have had the honour of becoming your son-in-law?’