long intervals. Mr. Prohack wondered what the deuce Softly
Bishop had done that Angmering should leave him a hundred thousand
pounds. He tried to feel grief for the tragic and untimely death of his
old friend Angmering, and failed. No doubt the failure was due to the
fact that he had not seen Angmering for so many years.

At last Mr. Prohack, his hands in his pockets, his legs stretched out,
his gaze uplifted, he said suddenly:

"I suppose it'll hold water?"

"What? The roof of the car?"

"No. The will."

Mr. Softly Bishop gave a short laugh, but made no other answer.

IV

The car halted finally before an immense new block of buildings, and the
inheritors floated up to the fifth floor in a padded lift manned by a
brilliantly-uniformed attendant. Mr. Prohack saw "Smathe and Smathe" in
gilt on a glass door. The enquiry office resembled the ante-room of a
restaurant, as the whole building resembled a fashionable hotel.
Everywhere was mosaic flooring.

"Mr. Percy Smathe?" demanded Bishop of a clerk whose head glittered in
the white radiance of a green-shaded lamp.

"I'll see, sir. Please step into the waiting-room." And he waved a
patronising negligent hand. "What name?" he added.

"Have you forgotten my name already?" Mr. Bishop retorted sharply.
"Bishop. Tell Mr. Percy Smathe I'm here. At once, please."

And he led Mr. Prohack to the waiting-room, which was a magnificent
apartment with stained glass windows, furnished in Chippendale similar
to, but much finer than, the furnishing of Mr. Prohack's own house. On
the table were newspapers and periodicals. Not _The Engineering Times_
of April in the previous year or a _Punch_ of the previous decade, and
_The Vaccination Record_; but such things as the current _Tatler, Times,
Economist_, and _La Vie Parisienne._

Mr. Prohack had uncomfortable qualms of apprehension. For several
minutes past he had been thinking: "Suppose there _is_ something up with
that will!" He had little confidence in Mr. Softly Bishop. And now the
aspect of the solicitors' office frightened him. It had happened to him,
being a favourite trustee of his relations and friends, to visit the
offices of some of the first legal firms in Lincoln's Inn Fields. You
entered these lairs by a dirty door and a dirty corridor and another
dirty door. You were interrogated by a shabby clerk who sat on a foul
stool at a foul desk in a foul office. And finally after an interval in
a cubby hole that could n