"Good evening, Mr. Munt." The greeting was very friendly and pleasant. "Sit down, won't you?"
"No, I'll stand--and grow better." Mr. Munt had a stock of stereotyped pleasantries which he kept for social use. They seemed to make for ease and geniality.
The two men stood looking at each other, the solicitor all rounded corners and quiet ease, the client stiff, angular, assertive, perhaps a shade embarrassed.
The answer was slow in coming. It was embodied in a harsh growl. "Mossop, I want you to take that gel of mine, Sally, out of my will."
The lawyer said nothing, but pursed his lips a little, a way he had when setting the mind to work, but that was the only expression of visible feeling in the heavily lined face.
"Excuse my troubling you to-night, Mossop. But I felt I couldn't wait. Give me an appointment for the morning and I'll look in at the office. Nice goings on! And to think what her education cost me!"
The lawyer made a silent gesture, spreading his hands like a stage Frenchman, half dismay, half tacit protest.
"Better have a new document, eh?" The outraged parent had been already dismissed; the highly competent man of affairs was now in control. "My second girl, Ethel, Mrs. Doctor Cockburn, can have it all now, except"--Josiah hesitated an instant--"except five thousand pounds I shall leave to Gertrude Preston."
Lawyer Mossop was still silent. But the mobile lips were working curiously. "Not for me to advise," he said at last, very slowly, with much hesitation, "but if I might----"
Josiah cut him short with a stern lift of the hand.
"I know what you're going to say, but if she was your gel what'd you do, eh?"
Lawyer Mossop rubbed his cheek perplexedly. "At bottom I might be rather proud of her."
"You--might--be--rather--proud--of--her!" It was the tone of Alderman Munt J.P. to a particularly unsatisfactory witness at a morning session at the City Hall. An obvious lie, yet a white one because it was used for a moral purpose. Mossop had no ax to grind; he merely wanted to soften things a bit for a client and neighbor. "You can't tell _me_, Mossop, you really think _that_."
The solicitor gazed steadily past the purple face of his client through the open window to the riot of color beyond. "Why not?" he said. "Think of the pluck required to do a thing like that."