"Yes, sir, not five minutes ago;" and Mr. Hankins swung his bunch of keys again as a polite intimation to Mr. Halling that it was not part of his contract to stand talking to him all night.
"You got some more barytes in to-day," remarked Rupert, wilfully disregarding the hint.
"You can call it barytes, of course, sir, if you like," was the reply, "I call it stuff."
"It is not good then?"
"Good! Now I should just wish you to see it. Naturally, not having been brought up to the business, you cannot be supposed to know all the ins and outs of our trade, but a child might tell the inferiority of this. If not detaining you, sir, I really should feel obliged by your stepping this way," and with an air he flung open the door of his office, and pointing to a powder of a whity-brown colour lying on the desk, asked ironically,
"That is a first-rate article, ain't it, sir?"
Rupert shook his head; and Mr. Hankins thus encouraged, pressed his point.
"Here, ma'am," he said, taking up an other parcel and opening it, "is something like. Look at the difference. I declare, upon my conscience," continued Mr. Hankins, turning to Rupert and forgetting in his energy the presence of his employer's wife, "it is enough to drive a man out of his mind to be obliged to sign a receipt-note for such rubbish. I often think things here might make people believe that old story the parsons tell about the Israelites being ordered to make bricks without straw. After what I have seen this last eighteen months I fancy I could almost swallow anything," finished Mr. Hankins with that advanced and almost unconscious scepticism which is so curious an adjunct to skilled labour at this period of the world's history.
Rupert looked uneasily at his companion. At any other time she might have felt inclined to enter into a controversy with Mr. Hankins on the religious question, but at that moment her heart was so full of her husband's position that the orthodoxy or non-orthodoxy of any person's opinions seemed quite a secondary matter in her eyes.
"Surely," she began, "Mr. Mortomley is the only person to say here what is good or bad. If he approves of this," and she pointed to the barytes, "it is not fitting any one else should disapprove."