"No," he said. "I have heard from your brother Serge."
"Serge!" said Gertrude, snatched from her tender dreams.
"Oh! Then of course he's a millionaire. Hurrah! He'll buy Frederic a partnership, and me a husband--catch me marrying a poor man--and Mary a genuine Strad, and Gertie a--an acolyte."
Gertrude flushed hotly and looked daggers across the table.
"He merely writes that he is coming home, as though he had only been away a week."
"Some of you children can hardly remember him," said Martha.
Minna said she could just recollect his putting her into a bassinette and letting her go flying down a hill into a pond.
"He sent your mother some water-colour drawings."
"I think they're quite good. But I don't know anything about these things."
"I'll take them to old Lawrie. He'll know," said Frederic.
Minna winked at Frederic. He had often talked to her about old Lawrie, and she had discovered that the name of the young acolyte at St. Saviour's was Bennett Lawrie, old James' third son.
"I say," said Frederic, "does Serge know we're here?"
"No. The letter was forwarded from St. Withans."
"Don't you think you ought to let him know what he's in for?"
"It won't matter to him if he's rich," said Minna, and they all fell to and rummaged their memories for recollections of Serge as a boy. Minna invented lavishly and suddenly she shouted:
"I bet it's a blackamoor like old Nicholas Folyat," said Frederic.
"Even if she is black," said Mrs. Folyat solemnly, "if he is married to her she will be my daughter-in-law and I shall receive her."
The conversation took on a broad complexion which is more permissible in the family circle than in the printed page.
That evening Frederic took Serge's drawings with him and sought out old Lawrie in the Arts Club, where always on a Sunday evening there was a gathering of old warriors and choice spirits--Joshua Yeo, Elihu Beecroft, the painter, Peter Maitland, who wrote pantomimes, and Warlock Clynes, the photographer, and B. J. Strutt, the manager of the old theatre, where, as a young man, Henry Irving had been a member of the stock company. They were smoking and drinking and yarning. They had vast stores of anecdotes of the great Bohemians in London. Beecroft had twice had pictures in the Academy, and B. J. Strutt had begun life as a call-boy at the Haymarket Theatre. Old James Lawrie had been to London three times and had shaken hands with J. L. Toole and Helen Faucit, and Clement Scott had sent him a copy of his Ballads, of which he had produced many gross parodies.