“Is it business?” asked Old Sharon, speaking in a hoarse, asthmatical voice, and fixing a pair of bright, shameless, black eyes attentively on the two visitors.

“It is business,” Mr. Troy answered, looking at the old rogue who had disgraced an honorable profession, as he might have looked at a reptile which had just risen rampant at his feet.  “What is your fee for a consultation?”

“You give me a guinea, and I’ll give you half an hour.”  With this reply Old Sharon held out his unwashed hand across the rickety ink-splashed table at which he was sitting.

Mr. Troy would not have touched him with the tips of his own fingers for a thousand pounds.  He laid the guinea on the table.

Old Sharon burst into a fierce laugh—­a laugh strangely accompanied by a frowning contraction of his eyebrows, and a frightful exhibition of the whole inside of his mouth.  “I’m not clean enough for you—­eh?” he said, with an appearance of being very much amused.  “There’s a dirty old man described in this book that is a little like me.”  He held up his French novel.  “Have you read it?  A capital story—­well put together.  Ah, you haven’t read it?  You have got a pleasure to come.  I say, do you mind tobacco-smoke?  I think faster while I smoke—­that’s all.”

Mr. Troy’s respectable hand waved a silent permission to smoke, given under dignified protest.

“All right,” said Old Sharon.  “Now, get on.”

He laid himself back in his chair, and puffed out his smoke, with eyes lazily half closed, like the eyes of the pug-dog on his lap.  At that moment, indeed there was a curious resemblance between the two.  They both seemed to be preparing themselves, in the same idle way, for the same comfortable nap.

Mr. Troy stated the circumstances under which the five hundred pound note had disappeared, in clear and consecutive narrative.  When he had done, Old Sharon suddenly opened his eyes.  The pug-dog suddenly opened his eyes.  Old Sharon looked hard at Mr. Troy.  The pug looked hard at Mr. Troy.  Old Sharon spoke.  The pug growled.

“I know who you are—­you’re a lawyer.  Don’t be alarmed!  I never saw you before; and I don’t know your name.  What I do know is a lawyer’s statement of facts when I hear it.  Who’s this?” Old Sharon looked inquisitively at Moody as he put the question.

Mr. Troy introduced Moody as a competent witness, thoroughly acquainted with the circumstances, and ready and willing to answer any questions relating to them.  Old Sharon waited a little, smoking hard and thinking hard.  “Now, then!” he burst out in his fiercely sudden way.  “I’m going to get to the root of the matter.”

He leaned forward with his elbows on the table, and began his examination of Moody.  Heartily as Mr. Troy despised and disliked the old rogue, he listened with astonishment and admiration—­literally extorted from him by the marvelous ability with which the questions were adapted to the end in view.  In a quarter of an hour Old Sharon had extracted from the witness everything, literally everything down to the smallest detail, that Moody could tell him.  Having now, in his own phrase, “got to the root of the matter,” he relighted his pipe with a grunt of satisfaction, and laid himself back in his old armchair.