Mr. Wade, in fact, looked upon “The Brambles” as a place of rest, arriving there at half-past six, in time to dress for a very good dinner. After dinner he read in a small way by no means to be despised. He had a taste for biography, and cherished in his stout heart a fine old respect for Thackeray and Dickens and Walter Scott. Of the modern fictionists he knew nothing.
“Seems to me they are splitting straws, my dear,” he once said to an earnest young person who thought that literature meant contemporary fiction, whereas we all know that the two are in no way connected.
Joseph Wade was a widower, having some years before buried a wife as stout and sensible as himself. He never spoke of her except to his daughter Marguerite, now leaving school, and usually confined his remarks to a consideration of what Marguerite's mother would have liked in the circumstances under discussion at the moment.
Marguerite had been educated at Cheltenham, and “finished” at Dresden, without any limit as to extras. She had come home from Dresden a few months before the Malgamite scheme was set on foot, to find herself regarded by her father in the light of a rather delicate financial crisis. The affection which had always existed between father and daughter soon developed into something stronger—something volatile and half mocking on her part, indulgent and half mystified on his.
“She is rather a handful,” wrote Mr. Wade to Tony Cornish, “and too inconsequent to let my mind be easy about her future. I wish you would run down and dine and sleep at 'The Brambles' some evening soon. Monday is Marguerite's eighteenth birthday. Will you come on that evening?”
“He is not thirty-three yet,” reflected Mr. Wade, as he folded the letter and slipped it into an envelope, “and she is the sort of girl who must be able to give a man her full respect before she can give him—er—anything else.”
From which it may be perceived that the astute banker was preparing to face the delicate financial crisis.
Cornish received the invitation the day after returning from Holland. Mr. Wade had been his father's friend and trustee, and was, he understood, distantly related to the mother whom Tony had never known. Such invitations were not infrequent, and it was the recipient's custom to set aside others in order to reply with an acceptance. A friendship had sprung up between two men who were not only divided by a gulf of years, but had hardly a thought in common.
On arriving at Weybridge station, Cornish found Marguerite awaiting his arrival in a very high dog-cart drawn by an exceedingly shiny cob, which animal she proceeded to handle with vast spirit and a blithe ignorance. She looked trim and fresh, with bright brown hair under a smart sailor hat, and a complexion almost dazzling in its youthfulness and brilliancy. She nodded gaily at Cornish.
“Hop up,” she said encouragingly, “and then hang on like grim death. There are going to be—whoa, my pet!—er—ructions. All right, William. Let go.”