Free The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder by Edgar Wallace Page B

he said vigorously. ‘I can’t imagine how you’ve endured that boudoir atmosphere so long. What did he say?’ he asked again, and, before she could answer: ‘Anyway, Telfers are shaky. There are all sorts of queer rumours about them in the City.’
    ‘But I thought it was a very rich corporation!’ she said in astonishment.
    He shook his head.
    ‘It was – but they’ve been doing lunatic things – what can you expect with a half-witted weakling like Sidney Telfer at the head of affairs? They underwrote three concerns last year that no brokerage business would have touched with a barge-pole, and they had to take up the shares. One was a lost treasure company to raise a Spanish galleon that sank three hundred years ago! But what really did happen yesterday morning?’
    ‘I’ll tell you tonight,’ she said, and bade him a hasty farewell.
    Mr Sidney Telfer had arrived when she went into a room which, in its luxurious appointments, its soft carpet and dainty etceteras, was not wholly undeserving of Roy Master’s description.
    The head of Telfers Consolidated seldom visited his main office on Threadneedle Street. The atmosphere of the place, he said, depressed him; it was all so horrid and sordid and rough. The founder of the firm, his grandfather, had died ten years before Sidney had been born, leaving the business to his son, a chronic invalid, who had died a few weeks after Sidney first saw the light. In the hands of trustees the business had flourished, despite the spasmodic interferences of his eccentric mother, whose peculiarities culminated in a will which relieved him of most of that restraint which is wisely laid upon a boy of sixteen.
    The room, with its luxurious furnishing, fitted Mr Telfer perfectly, for he was exquisitely arrayed. He was tall and so painfully thin that the abnormal smallness of his head was not at first apparent. As the girl came into the room he was sniffing delicately at a fine cambric handkerchief, and she thought that he was paler than she had ever seen him – and more repulsive.
    He followed her movements with a dull stare, and she had placed his letters on his table before he spoke.
    ‘I say, Miss Belman, you won’t mention a word about what I said to you last night?’
    ‘Mr Telfer,’ she answered quietly, ‘I am hardly likely to discuss such a matter.’
    ‘I’d marry you and all that, only…clause in my mother’s will,’ he said disjointedly. ‘That could be got over – in time.’
    She stood by the table, her hands resting on the edge. ‘I would not marry you, Mr Telfer, even if there were no clause in your mother’s will; the suggestion that I should run away with you to America–’
    ‘South America,’ he corrected her gravely. ‘Not the United States; there was never any suggestion of the United States.’
    She could have smiled, for she was not as angry with this rather vacant young man as his startling proposition entitled her to be.
    ‘The point is,’ he went on anxiously, ‘you’ll keep it to yourself? I’ve been dreadfully worried all night. I told you to send me a note saying what you thought of my idea – well, don’t!’
    This time she did smile, but before she could answer him he went on, speaking rapidly in a high treble that sometimes rose to a falsetto squeak:
    ‘You’re a perfectly beautiful girl, and I’m crazy about you, but…there’s a tragedy in my life…really. Perfectly ghastly tragedy. And everything’s at sixes and sevens. If I’d had any sense I’d have brought in a fellow to look after things. I’m beginning to see that now.’
    For the second time in twenty-four hours this young man, who had been almost tongue-tied and had never deigned to notice her, had poured forth a torrent of confidences; and on the first occasion had, with frantic insistence, set forth a plan which had amazed and shocked her. Abruptly he finished, wiped his weak eyes, and in his normal voice:
    ‘Get Billingham on the phone; I want