'Enough to get on with.'
'Could you look things up in Herodotus?'
'Certainly?'
'In the original?'
'Oh, dear, yes.'
He regarded me once more with the same astonished glance. His own classics, I soon learnt, were limited to the amount which a public school succeeds in dinning, during the intervals of cricket and football into an English gentleman. Then he informed me that he wished me to hunt up certain facts in Herodotus "and elsewhere" confirmatory of his view that the English were the descendants of the Ten Tribes. I promised to do so, swallowing even that comprehensive "elsewhere." It was none of my business to believe or disbelieve: I was paid to get up a case, and I got one up to the best of my ability. I imagine it was at least as good as most other cases in similar matters: at any rate, it pleased the old gentleman vastly.
By dint of listening, I began to like him. But Elsie couldn't bear him. She hated the fat crease at the back of his neck, she told me.
After a week or two devoted to the Interpretation of Prophecy on a strictly commercial basis of Founders' Shares, with interludes of mining engineers' reports upon the rubies of Mount Sinai and the supposed auriferous quartzites of Palestine, the Urbane Old Gentleman trotted down to the office one day, carrying a packet of notes of most voluminous magnitude. "Can we work in a room alone this morning, Miss Cayley?" he asked, with mystery in his voice: he was always mysterious. "I want to intrust you with a piece of work of an exceptionally private and confidential character. It concerns Property. In point of fact," he dropped his voice to a whisper. "I want you to draw up my will for me."
"Certainly," I said, opening the door into the back office. But I trembled in my shoes. Could this mean that he was going to draw up a will, disinheriting Harold Tillington?
And, suppose he did, what then? My heart was in a tumult. If Harold were rich—well and good, I could never marry him. But, if Harold were poor— I must keep my promise. Could I wish him to be rich? Could I wish him to be poor? My heart stood divided two ways within me.