"Hallo, Uncle Jimmy! Half a mo'!"
Mr. Haliburton, seated dizzily in a rose-bed in the garden, heard Hughie's step returning to the French window above his head. A walking-stick suddenly speared itself in the soil beside him, and a pair of gloves and a Homburg hat pattered delicately down upon his upturned countenance; while Hughie's voice intimated that there was a swift and well-cushioned train back to town at six-twenty.
Then, closing the window and leaving Mr. Haliburton to extract himself tenderly from his bed of roses, cursing feebly the while and ruminating bitterly upon the unreliability of proverbial expressions, Hughie turned to the room again. It had just occurred to him that in the heat of the moment he had been a trifle cavalier in his reception of a relative whom he had not seen for ten years, and who he imagined had been dead for four.
Half an hour later Jimmy Marrable enquired:—
"Would it be too much to ask whom you were throwing out of the window when I came in?"
"Friend of Joey's," said Hughie briefly. "And now, Uncle Jimmy," he added, with clouding brow,—the joy of battle was overpast, and the horizon was dark with the wings of all kinds of chickens coming home to roost,—"I should like to inform you that you and your financial methods have put me in a devil of a hole. I want an explanation."
"Right. Fire away!"
"Well, when I took on the job bequeathed to me by you of administering Joan's affairs, I discovered that instead of being an heiress, the child was practically penniless. For some idiotic reason best known to yourself, you no sooner put money into the bank for her than you dragged it all out again. Consequently I discovered that I was booked to manage the affairs of a girl whom everybody thought to be the possessor of pots of money, but whose entire capital"—he picked up the pass-book—"amounted in reality to one hundred pounds sterling."
"Correct!" said Jimmy Marrable. "Proceed!"
"If," continued Hughie in an even and businesslike tone, "Joan had been prepared to marry me, the money wouldn't have mattered, as she could have had mine. Unfortunately that event did not occur."