Praed:  “Well, when Vivie herself comes to ask me, p’raps I’ll tell; but I can’t see how it concerns you.  Why not stop and dine—­a l’imprevu, but I dare say my housekeeper can rake something together or it may not be too late to send out for a pate.  We can then talk of other things.  When are you going to get your call?”

David:  “Sorry, dear old chap, but I can’t stay to dinner.  I’m not going anywhere else but I’ve got some papers I must study before I go to bed.  But I’ll stop another half-hour at any rate.  Don’t ring for lights or turn up the electric lamps.  I would sooner sit in the dark studio and put my question.  Who has given me that thousand pounds?”

Praed:  “That’s my business:  I haven’t!  I shan’t give or lend Vivie a penny till she consents to marry me.  As to the rest, take it and be thankful.  You’re not certain to get any more and I happen to know it had what you would call a ‘clean origin.’”

David:  “You mean it didn’t come from those ’Hotels’?”

Praed:  “Well, at any rate not directly.  Don’t be a romantic ass, a tiresome fool, and give me any trouble about it.  A certain person I imagine must have heard that Fraser and Warren had been wound up and couldn’t bear the thought of your being hard up in consequence ... doesn’t know you got a share of the purchase-money...”

* * * * *

David decided at any rate for the present to accept the addition to his capital—­you can perhaps push principle too far; or, once you plunge into affairs, you cease to be quite so high-souled.  At any rate nothing in David’s middle-class mind was so horrible as penury and the impotence that comes with it.  How many months or years would lie ahead of him before fees could be gained and a professional income be earned?  Besides he wanted to take Bertie Adams into his service as a Clerk.  A barrister must have a clerk, and David in his peculiar circumstances could only engage one acquainted more or less with his secret.

So Bertie Adams fulfilled the ambition he had cherished for three years—­he felt all along it was coming true.  And when David was called to the Bar—­which he was with all the stately ceremonial of a Call night at the Inner Temple in the Easter term of 1905, more elbow room was acquired at Fig Tree Court, and Bertie Adams was installed there as clerk to Mr. David Vavasour Williams, who had residential chambers on the third floor, and a fair-sized Office and small private room on the second floor.  Bertie’s mother had “washed” for both Honoria and Vivie in their respective dwellings for years, and for David after he came to live at Fig Tree Court.  A substantial douceur to the “housekeeper” had facilitated this, for in the part of the Temple where lies Fig Tree Court the residents do not call their ministrants “laundresses,” but “housekeepers.”  Curiously enough the accounts were always tendered to the absent Vivie Warren, but Mrs. Adams noted no discrepancy in their being paid by her son or in an unmarried lady living in the Temple under the name of David Williams.