As he spoke he straightened himself up from his desk in a weary kind of way, and began to mend his pen: they used quills in those good old times.
“Just two years! How the time flies! And we’re not getting any younger. Are we, partner?”
Whether Mr. Keane heard what he said or not, he certainly did not reply immediately. He was standing by the window, gazing out into the half-dark, fog-shaded street.
“Fog, fog, fog!” he grunted peevishly; “nothing but fog and gloom. Been nothing else all winter; and now that spring has all but come, why it’s fog, fog, fog, just the same! Tired of it—sick of it!”
Then he turned sharply round, exclaiming, “What did you say about Jack and about growing younger?”
Mr. Richards smiled a conciliatory smile. He was the junior partner though the older man—if that is not a paradox—for his share in the firm was not a quarter as large as Keane’s, who was really Keane by name and keen by nature, of small stature, with dark hair turning gray, active, business-like, and a trifle suspicious.
Mr. Richards was delightfully different in every way—a round rosy face that might have belonged to some old sea-captain, a bald and rosy forehead, hair as white as drifted snow, and a pair of blue eyes that always seemed brimming over with kindness and good-humour.
“I was talking more to my pen than to you,” he said quietly.
“But what’s given you Jack on the brain, eh?”
“Oh, nothing—nothing in particular, that is. I happened to turn to his account, that is all.”