At this moment the brethren were interrupted by a ring at the bell, and Morris, going timorously to the door, received from the hands of a commissionaire a letter addressed in the hand of Michael.  Its contents ran as follows: 

Morris Finsbury, if this should meet the eye of, he will hear of something to his advantage at my office, in Chancery Lane, at 10 A.M. tomorrow.

MICHAEL FINSBURY

So utter was Morris’s subjection that he did not wait to be asked, but handed the note to John as soon as he had glanced at it himself.

‘That’s the way to write a letter,’ cried John.  ’Nobody but Michael could have written that.’

And Morris did not even claim the credit of priority.

CHAPTER XVI.  Final Adjustment of the Leather Business

Finsbury brothers were ushered, at ten the next morning, into a large apartment in Michael’s office; the Great Vance, somewhat restored from yesterday’s exhaustion, but with one foot in a slipper; Morris, not positively damaged, but a man ten years older than he who had left Bournemouth eight days before, his face ploughed full of anxious wrinkles, his dark hair liberally grizzled at the temples.

Three persons were seated at a table to receive them:  Michael in the midst, Gideon Forsyth on his right hand, on his left an ancient gentleman with spectacles and silver hair.  ‘By Jingo, it’s Uncle Joe!’ cried John.

But Morris approached his uncle with a pale countenance and glittering eyes.

‘I’ll tell you what you did!’ he cried.  ‘You absconded!’

‘Good morning, Morris Finsbury,’ returned Joseph, with no less asperity; ‘you are looking seriously ill.’

‘No use making trouble now,’ remarked Michael.  ’Look the facts in the face.  Your uncle, as you see, was not so much as shaken in the accident; a man of your humane disposition ought to be delighted.’

‘Then, if that’s so,’ Morris broke forth, ’how about the body?  You don’t mean to insinuate that thing I schemed and sweated for, and colported with my own hands, was the body of a total stranger?’

‘O no, we can’t go as far as that,’ said Michael soothingly; ’you may have met him at the club.’

Morris fell into a chair.  ’I would have found it out if it had come to the house,’ he complained.  ’And why didn’t it? why did it go to Pitman? what right had Pitman to open it?’

’If you come to that, Morris, what have you done with the colossal Hercules?’ asked Michael.

‘He went through it with the meat-axe,’ said John.  ’It’s all in spillikins in the back garden.’

‘Well, there’s one thing,’ snapped Morris; ’there’s my uncle again, my fraudulent trustee.  He’s mine, anyway.  And the tontine too.  I claim the tontine; I claim it now.  I believe Uncle Masterman’s dead.’