“You will wait for me, John,” said Miss Mackenzie, asking this favour of him as though she were very anxious that he should grant it.

Mr Slow said that he might be closeted with Miss Mackenzie for some little time, perhaps for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. John Ball looked at his watch, and then at his cousin’s face, and then promised that he would wait. Mr Slow himself took him into the outer office, and then handed him a chair; but he observed that he was not allowed to go back into the waiting-room.

There he waited for three-quarters of an hour, constantly looking at his watch, and thinking more and more about that deed of gift. Surely it must be the case that the document which he had seen had some reference to this great delay. At last he heard a door open, and a step along a passage, and then another door was opened, and Mr Slow reappeared with Margaret Mackenzie behind him. John Ball’s eyes immediately fell on his cousin’s face, and he could see that it was very pale. The lawyer’s wore that smile which men put on when they wish to cover the disagreeable seriousness of the moment.

“Good morning, Miss Mackenzie,” said he, pressing his client’s hand.

“Good morning, sir,” said she.

The lawyer and Mr Ball then touched each other’s hands, and the former followed his cousin down the steps out into the square.

Chapter XVIII.
Tribulation

When they were once more out in the square, side by side, Miss Mackenzie took hold of her cousin’s arm and walked on for a few steps in silence, in the direction of Great Queen Street—that is to say, away from the city, towards which she knew her cousin would go in pursuit of his own business. And indeed the hour was now close at hand in which he should be sitting as a director at the Shadrach Fire Assurance Office. If not at the Shadrach by two, or, with all possible allowance for the shortcoming of a generally punctual director, by a quarter past two, he would be too late for his guinea; and now, as he looked at his watch, it wanted only ten minutes to two. He was very particular about these guineas, and the chambers of the Shadrach were away in Old Broad Street. Nevertheless he walked on with her.

“John,” she said, when they had walked half the length of that side of the square, “I have heard dreadful news.”

Then that deed of gift was, after all, a fact; and Mr Slow, instead of being a rogue, must be the honestest old lawyer in London! He must have been at work in discovering the wrong that had been done, and was now about to reveal it to the world. Some such idea as this had glimmered across Mr Ball’s mind as he had sat in Mr Slow’s outer office, with his chin still resting on his umbrella.