Yes-ticklish!  What he did now must have a proper legal bottom.  Still, anyway you looked at it, he had a right to investigate a fraud on himself as a shareholder of “The Island Navigation Company,” and a fraud on himself as a creditor of old Heythorp.  Quite!  But suppose this Mrs. Larne was really entangled with old Pillin, and the settlement a mere reward of virtue, easy or otherwise.  Well! in that case there’d be no secret commission to make public, and he needn’t go further.  So that, in either event, he would be all right.  Only—­how to introduce himself?  He might pretend he was a newspaper man wanting a story.  No, that wouldn’t do!  He must not represent that he was what he was not, in case he had afterwards to justify his actions publicly, always a difficult thing, if you were not careful!  At that moment there came into his mind a question Bob Pillin had asked the other night.  “By the way, you can’t borrow on a settlement, can you?  Isn’t there generally some clause against it?” Had this woman been trying to borrow from him on that settlement?  But at this moment he reached the house, and got out of his cab still undecided as to how he was going to work the oracle.  Impudence, constitutional and professional, sustained him in saying to the little maid: 

“Mrs. Larne at home?  Say Mr. Charles Ventnor, will you?”

His quick brown eyes took in the apparel of the passage which served for hall—­the deep blue paper on the walls, lilac-patterned curtains over the doors, the well-known print of a nude young woman looking over her shoulder, and he thought:  ‘H’m!  Distinctly tasty!’ They noted, too, a small brown-and-white dog cowering in terror at the very end of the passage, and he murmured affably:  “Fluffy!  Come here, Fluffy!” till Carmen’s teeth chattered in her head.

“Will you come in, sir?”

Mr. Ventnor ran his hand over his whiskers, and, entering a room, was impressed at once by its air of domesticity.  On a sofa a handsome woman and a pretty young girl were surrounded by sewing apparatus and some white material.  The girl looked up, but the elder lady rose.

Mr. Ventnor said easily

“You know my young friend, Mr. Robert Pillin, I think.”

The lady, whose bulk and bloom struck him to the point of admiration, murmured in a full, sweet drawl: 

“Oh!  Ye-es.  Are you from Messrs. Scrivens?”

With the swift reflection:  ‘As I thought!’ Mr. Ventnor answered: 

“Er—­not exactly.  I am a solicitor though; came just to ask about a certain settlement that Mr. Pillin tells me you’re entitled under.”

“Phyllis dear!”

Seeing the girl about to rise from underneath the white stuff, Mr. Ventnor said quickly: 

“Pray don’t disturb yourself—­just a formality!” It had struck him at once that the lady would have to speak the truth in the presence of this third party, and he went on:  “Quite recent, I think.  This’ll be your first interest-on six thousand pounds?  Is that right?” And at the limpid assent of that rich, sweet voice, he thought:  ’Fine woman; what eyes!’