Northover bowed. "Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to
me?"

"Say!" cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; "why, I want this
confounded thing settled. I want--"

"Certainly, sir," said Northover, jumping up with a slight
elevation of the eyebrows. "Will you take a chair for a moment."
And he pressed an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and
tinkled in a room beyond. The Major put his hand on the back of the
chair offered him, but stood chafing and beating the floor with his
polished boot.

The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy,
young man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.

"Mr Hopson," said Northover, "this is Major Brown. Will you please
finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?"

"Yes, sir," said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.

"You will excuse me, gentlemen," said the egregious Northover, with
his radiant smile, "if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready.
I have some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my
holiday tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we?
Ha! ha!"

The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a
silence ensued; a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G.
Northover; a raging silence on the part of everybody else.