"
With a "Pray be seated!" Ocock rose and cleared a chair for Purdy.
Resuming his seat he joined his hands, and wound them in and out. "I
think you may take it from me that no case is so unpromising but what we
shall be able to find a loophole."
Mahony thanked him--with a touch of reserve. "I trust you will still be
of that opinion when you have heard the facts." And went on: "Myself, I
do not doubt it. I am not a rich man, but serious though the monetary
loss would be to me, I should settle the matter out of court, were I not
positive that I had right on my side." To which Ocock returned a quick:
"Oh, quite so . . . of course."
Like his old father, he was a short, heavily built man; but there the
likeness ended. He had a high, domed forehead, above a thin, hooked
nose. His skin was of an almost Jewish pallor. Fringes of straight,
jet-black hair grew down the walls of his cheeks and round his chin,
meeting beneath it. The shaven upper lid was long and flat, with no
central markings, and helped to form a mouth that had not much more shape
or expression than a slit cut by a knife in a sheet of paper. The chin was
bare to the size of a crown-piece; and, both while he spoke and while he
listened to others speaking, the lawyer caressed this patch with his
finger-tips; so that in the course of time it had arrived at a state of
high polish--like the shell of an egg.
The air with which he heard his new client out was of a non-committal
kind; and Mahony, having talked his first heat off, grew chilled by the
wet blanket of Ocock's silence.
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