‘Who’s Bradstreet?’
‘The leading authority on millionaires. A sort of American Debrett. Bradstreet is very definite on the subject of James Schoonmaker. Stinking rich is, I believe, the expression it uses of him.’
The Duke continued to bend his brain to the problem. He was more convinced than ever that he had been deceived.
‘Then why did she take that cheque?’
‘Ah, that we shall never know.’ Just girlish high spirits, do you think?’
‘I’ll give her girlish high spirits!’
‘I’ll tell you a possible solution that has occurred to me. She knew that Archie was planning to get married and needed money, so being a kind-hearted girl she took the cheque and endorsed it over to him.’ Sort of a wedding present from you. Where are you going?’
The Duke had lumbered to the door. He paused with a hand on the handle, regarded Lord Ickenham balefully.
‘I’ll tell you where I’m going. I’m going to get to the telephone and stop that cheque.’
Lord Ickenham shook his head.’
‘I wouldn’t. I still have the tape, remember. I was just about to give it to you, but if you are going to stop cheques, I shall have to make an agonizing reappraisal.’
There was a silence, as far as silence was possible in a small room where the Duke was puffing at his moustache.
‘You shall have it tomorrow night after the cheque has gone through. It’s not that I don’t trust you, Dunstable, ‘it’s simply that I don’t trust you.’
The Duke breathed stertorously. He did not like many people, but he searched his mind in vain for somebody he disliked as much as he was disliking his present companion.
‘Ickenham,’ he said, ‘you are a low cad!’
‘Now you’re just trying to be nice. I bet you say that to all the boys,’ said Lord Ickenham, and rising from his chair he went off to tell Lord Emsworth that though he had lost Lavender Briggs and was losing a sister and the Duke of Dunstable, he would be gaining a pig which for three years in succession had won the silver medal in the Fat Pip class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show.
There was a smile on his handsome face, the smile it always wore when he had given service.
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P. G. Wodehouse, Service With a Smile
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