“Oh yus, me go ’ome and leave yer! Walker—I stays ’ere.”
“Very well, then,” said Reginald, with a sigh. “We may as well go on with the book. Suppose you read me about Giant Despair.”
Chapter Nineteen.
The Shades lose several good Customers.
It would be unfair to Samuel Shuckleford to say that he had no compunction whatever in deciding upon a course of action which he knew would involve the ruin of Reginald Cruden.
He did not like it at all. It was a nuisance; it was a complication likely to hamper him. He wished his mother and sister would be less gushing in the friendships they made. What right had they to interfere with his business prospects by tacking themselves on to the family of a man who was afterwards to turn out a swindler?
Yes, it was a nuisance; but for all that it must not be allowed to interfere with the course that lay before the rising lawyer. Business is business after all, and if Cruden is a swindler, whose fault is it if Cruden’s mother breaks her heart? Not S.S.’s, at any rate. But S.S.’s fault it would be if he made a mess of this “big job”! That was a reproach no one should lay at his door.
Samuel may not have been quite the Solomon he was wont to estimate himself. Still, to do him justice once more, he displayed no little ability in tracing out the different frauds of the Select Agency Corporation and establishing Reginald’s guilt conclusively in his own mind.