Doctor Toole came into the clerk's room, and was ushered by one of these
gentlemen through an empty chamber into the attorney's sanctum. Up two
steps stumbled the physician, cursing the house for a place where a
gentleman was so much more likely to break his neck than his fast, and
found old Gamble in his velvet cap and dressing-gown, in conference with
a hard-faced, pale, and pock-marked elderly man, squinting unpleasantly
under a black wig, who was narrating something slowly, and with effort,
like a man whose memory is labouring to give up its dead, while the
attorney, with his spectacles on his nose, was making notes. The speaker
ceased abruptly, and turned his pallid visage and jealous, oblique eyes
on the intruder.
Luke Gamble looked embarrassed, and shot one devilish angry glance at
his clerk, and then made Doctor Toole very welcome.
When Toole had ended his narrative, and the attorney read the notices
through, Mr. Gamble's countenance brightened, and darkened and
brightened again, and with a very significant look, he said to the pale,
unpleasant face, pitted with small-pox--
'M.
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