“You always are.”
His brother remembered this agreeable trait after five-and-twenty years. He got up, opened a cupboard, and took out a bottle and glasses and some soda-water. Then they sat opposite each other with the early tumbler and the morning cigar, beaming with fraternal affection.
“Like old times, old man,” said the barrister.
“It is. We’ll have many more old times,” said Fred, “now that I’m home again.”
In the words of the poet, “Alas! they had been friends in youth,” as well as brothers. And it might have been better had they not been friends in youth. And they had heard the midnight chimes together. And they had together wasted each his slender patrimony. But now they talked friendly over the sympathetic drink that survives the possibility of port and champagne, and even claret.
“Don’t they really suspect—any of them?” asked Brother Fred.
“None of them. They call me a distinguished lawyer and the Pride of the Family—next to Leonard, who’s in the House.”
“Isn’t there a danger of being found out?”
“Not a bit. The business is conducted by letter. I might as well have no office at all, except for the look of it. No, there’s no fear. Nobody ever comes here. How did you find me out?”
“Hotel clerk. He saw my name as a speaker at the dinner to-morrow, and suggested that I should write to you.”