'Ah! did you?'
'Did not you know I was there?' said Lake, in rather a changed tone. Larkin looked up, and Lake laughed in his face quietly the most impertinent laugh he had ever seen or heard, with his yellow eyes fixed on the lawyer's pink little optics. 'I was there, and Hockley was there, and Mark Wylder was there—was not he?' and Lake stared and laughed, and the attorney stared; and Lake added, 'What a d—d cunning fellow you are; ha, ha, ha!'
Larkin was not easily put out, but he was disconcerted now; and his cheeks and forehead grew suddenly pink, and he coughed a little, and tried to throw a look of mild surprise into his face.
'Why, you have this moment had a letter from Hockley. Don't you think I knew his hand and the post-mark, and your look said quite plainly, "Here's news of my friend Stanley Lake and Mark Wylder." I had an uncle in the Foreign Office, and they said he would have been quite a distinguished diplomatist if he had lived; and I was said to have a good deal of his talent; and I really think I have brought my little evidences very prettily together, and jumped to a right conclusion—eh?'
A flicker of that sinister shadow I have sometimes mentioned crossed
Larkin's face, and contracted his eyes, as he said, a little sternly—
'I have nothing on earth to conceal, Sir; I never had. All my conduct has been as open as the light; there's not a letter, Sir, I ever write or receive, that might not, so far as I am concerned, with my good will, lie open on that table for every visitor that comes in to read;—open as the day, Sir:' and the attorney waved his hand grandly.
'Hear, hear, hear,' said Lake, languidly, and tapping a little applause on the table, while he watched the solicitor's rhetoric with his sly, disconcerting smile.
'It was but conscientious, Captain Lake, that I should make particular enquiry respecting the genuineness of a legal instrument conferring such very considerable powers. How, on earth, Sir, could I have the slightest suspicion that you had seen my client, Mr. Wylder, considering the tenor of your letters and conversation? And I venture to say, Captain Lake, that Lord Chelford will be just as much surprised as I, when he hears it.'
Jos. Larkin, Esq., delivered this peroration from a moral elevation, all the loftier that he had a peer of the realm on his side. But peers did not in the least overawe Stanley Lake, who had been all his days familiar with those idols; and the moral altitudes of the attorney amused him vastly.
'But he'll not hear it; I won't tell him, and you sha'n't; because I don't think it would be prudent of us—do you?—to quarrel with Mark Wylder, and he does not wish our meeting known. It is nothing on earth to me; on the contrary, it rather places me in an awkward position keeping other people's secrets.'