* * * * *
Mr. Wade had wakened not only refreshed but in a mood which a certain irreverent clerk had once characterized as his “dusting off the earth day” and a good time to lie low. Hastings greeted the morning sun joyfully, because it shone on the little town where Elenore had spent her childhood.
Richards came in just as they were enjoying their after-breakfast cigars.
“Well,” he said, dropping into a chair without preliminary greetings, or waiting for Mr. Wade to request him to do so, “what’s the program for to-day?”
Then his eyes fell on Mr. Wade’s trouser legs.
“Told you it wouldn’t come off, didn’t I?” he laughed, boisterously.
Mr. Wade resented Richards’ unceremonious entrance, and resented still more this direct allusion to his sartorial disfigurement, which had resisted the most zealous efforts of Joseph. He considered that, under present circumstances, the legs should be considered as analogous to those of the Queen of Spain.
And that phrase of Hastings, “a matter of personal honor,” had hit the bull’s-eye.
Mr. Wade prided himself first that the family fortune had been made honestly, by the rise in Manhattan real estate; and last, that the Wade name stood in the business world to-day as a symbol of integrity that erred, if it erred at all, on the side of over-scrupulousness.
“Mr. Richards,” he said, a trifle stiffly, “when I inquired into the matter, you wrote me that Mr. Carrington’s grievance had no foundation in fact, did you not?”