The remaining brace were Lord Dawlish's
friend Jerry and his father, a formidable old man who knew all the
shady secrets of all the noble families in England.
Bill walked up the stairs and was shown into the room where Jerry,
when his father's eye was upon him, gave his daily imitation of a
young man labouring with diligence and enthusiasm at the law. His
father being at the moment out at lunch, the junior partner was
practising putts with an umbrella and a ball of paper.
Jerry Nichols was not the typical lawyer. At Cambridge, where Bill
had first made his acquaintance, he had been notable for an
exuberance of which Lincoln's Inn Fields had not yet cured him.
There was an airy disregard for legal formalities about him which
exasperated his father, an attorney of the old school. He came to
the point, directly Bill entered the room, with a speed and levity
that would have appalled Nichols Senior, and must have caused the
other two Nicholses to revolve in their graves.
'Halloa, Bill, old man,' he said, prodding him amiably in the
waistcoat with the ferrule of the umbrella. 'How's the boy? Fine!
So'm I. So you got my message? Wonderful invention, the
telephone.'
'I've just come from the club.'
'Take a chair.'
'What's the matter?'
Jerry Nichols thrust Bill into a chair and seated himself on the
table.
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