“Excuse me, sir; I think you had better not. It irritates him. Old Moredock came last night about some trifling ailment, and poor master was quite angry about it. Then Mr Thompson went up to his door, and it seemed to irritate him. You know how tetchy and fretful it makes any one when he’s ill.”
“I want to see him, Mrs Milt. I want to talk to him.”
Cousin Thompson’s eyes twitched.
“But I’ll go by your advice.”
Mrs Milt said something in reply which the listener missed, and consequently exaggerated largely as to its value, and directly after Salis went away in a new character—to wit, that of Cousin Thompson’s mortal enemy; though Salis himself was in utter ignorance of the fact.
“Well, and how are we to-day?” said the lawyer on entering the old library at the Hall.
Sir Thomas Candlish was lying back in his chair, with a cigar in his mouth, a sporting paper on his lap, and a soda and brandy—or, rather, two brandies and a soda—at his elbow.
“How are we to-day!” he snarled. “Don’t come here talking like a cursed smooth humbug of a doctor about to feel one’s pulse.”
“But I am a doctor, and I have come to feel your pulse, my dear sir,” said Cousin Thompson laughingly.
“Eh?—what? Again! Why, there’s nothing due yet.”