"Strange that the old lady should be so nervous just to-night--isn't it?--seeing these burglars have been knocking about for over a fortnight. Is this the first time she's got excited about it?"
"Yes, I think it is," said Rachel faintly, as it were submissively, with no sign of irritation against him.
With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like a couple of sparrows--inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that they said had the slightest originality, weight, or importance. But they both thought that their conversation was full of significance; which it was, though they could not explain it to themselves. What they happened to say did not matter in the least. If they had recited the Koran to each other the inexplicable significance of their words would have been the same.
Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and said with the most enchanting, persuasive friendliness--
"I wasn't frightened--truly! I don't know why I looked as though I was."
"You mean about the revolver--in the sitting-room?" He jumped nimbly back after her to the revolver question.
"Yes. Because I'm quite used to revolvers, you know. My brother had one. Only his was a Colt--one of those long things."
"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint.
Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her brother. In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed succinctly "Money" in the _Staffordshire Signal_, there once used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to a responsible applicant. No fussy inquiries. Distance no objection. Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. £3 to £10,000. Apply personally or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately, Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had already amassed reserves, and--without a drop of Jewish blood in his veins--possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's tool.