Edgar Wallace

“ Damn Ikey! Go along!”
He pushed the astonished youth from him.
Horace found the girl in the conservatory. He was bubbling over with joy. He had never expected to make so easy a conquest of the old man—so easy that he almost felt frightened. It was as if the Earl of Verlond, with that sardonic humour of his, was devising some method of humiliating him. Impulsively he told her all that had happened.
“I can’t believe it,” he cried, “he was so ready, so willing. He was brutal, of course, but that was natural.”
She looked at him with a little glint of amusement in her eyes. ”

“ The Earl of Verlond was a stickler for punctuality: a grim, bent old man, with a face that, so Society said, told eloquently the story of his life, his bitter tongue was sufficient to maintain for him the respect—or if not the respect, the fear that so ably substitutes respect—of his friends.
“Friends” is a word which you would never ordinarily apply to any of the earl’s acquaintances. He had apparently no friends save Sir Isaac Tramber. ”

“ Ikey frowned. “Old friend?”
The other nodded. “Military gent,” he said laconically. “A colonel in the army, though nobody knows the army.”
Sir Isaac’s jaw dropped. “Not Black?”
Lord Verlond nodded. He nodded several times, like a gleeful child confessing a fault of which it was inordinately proud. “Black it is,” he said, but made no mention of the girl. ”