"What do you go about giving people Sheldon's card for?" asked the clerk, with quite an aggrieved air. "I know Sheldon of Gray's Inn."
"Then I'm sure you've found him a very accommodating gentleman," I replied, politely.
"Deuce take his accommodation! He nearly accommodated me into the Bankruptcy Court. And so you're Sheldon's clerk, and you want the governor. But you don't mean to say that Grewter and Grewter are—"
This was said in an awe-stricken undertone. I hastened to reassure the stationer's clerk.
"I don't think Mr. Sheldon ever saw Mr. Grewter in his life," I said.
After this the clerk condescended to retire into the unknown antres behind the shop, to deliver my message. I began to think that George Sheldon's card was not the best possible letter of introduction.
The clerk returned presently, followed by a tall, white-bearded man, with a bent figure, and a pair of penetrating gray eyes—a very promising specimen of the octogenarian.
He asked me my business in a sharp suspicious way, that obliged me to state the nature of my errand without circumlocution. As I got farther away from the Rev. John Haygarth, intestate, I was less fettered by the necessity of secrecy. I informed my octogenarian that I was prosecuting a legal investigation connected with a late inhabitant of that street, and that I had taken the liberty to apply to him, in the hope that he might be able to afford me some information.
He looked at me all the time I spoke as if he thought I was going to entreat pecuniary relief—and I daresay I have something the air of a begging-letter writer. But when he found that I only wanted information, his hard gray eyes softened ever so little, and he asked me to walk into his parlour.
His parlour was scarcely less gruesome than his shop. The furniture looked as if its manufacture had been coeval with the time of the Meynells, and the ghastly glare of the gas seemed a kind of anachronism. After a few preliminary observations, which were not encouraged by Mr. Grewter's manner, I inquired whether he had ever heard the name of Meynell.