“Oh, I see. Things are as bad as that, are they? Any other rats?”—with a withering look at Arthur.
“I am afraid that there is no one else who can leave,” her father answered. “The gangway is down now, my dear, and we sink or swim together.”
“Ah! Well, I fancy there’s one of the rats in the dining-room now. That is what I came to tell you. He wants to see you, dad.”
“Who is it?”
“Mr. Acherley.”
Ovington shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it is after hours,” he said, “but—I’ll see him.”
That broke up the meeting. The banker went out to interview his visitor, who had been standing for some minutes at one of the windows of the dining-room, looking out on the slender stream of traffic that passed up and down the pavement or slid round the opposite corner into the Market Place.
Acherley was not of those who go round about when a direct and more brutal approach will serve. Broken fortunes had soured rather than tamed him, and though, when there had been something to be gained by it, he had known how to treat the banker with an easy familiarity, the contempt in which he held men of that class made it more natural to him to bully than to fawn. Before he had turned to the street for amusement he had surveyed the furniture of the room with a morose eye, had damned the upstart’s impudence for setting himself up with such things, and consoled himself with the reflection that he would soon see it under the hammer. “And a d—d good job, too!” he had muttered. “What the blazes does he want with a kidney wine-table and a plate-chest! It will serve Bourdillon right for lowering himself to such people!”
When the banker came to him he made no apology for the lateness of his visit, but “Hallo!” he said bluntly, “I want a little talk with you. But short’s the word. Fact is, I find I’ve more of those railway shares than it suits me to keep, Ovington, and I want you to take a hundred off my hands. I hear they’re fetching two-ten.”
“One-ten,” the banker said. “They are barely that.”