“But Himmel! did you not make him an offer?” demanded Hirsch next day in
the Bond Street shop—they called it gallery—to which his partner had
returned from Tweedside with the profound depression a man might have who
had for a fleeting moment seen the only woman he could ever love and then
had lost her in a panic.
“Offer, Joel!” he replied in accents of despair. “I offered him five
thousand, and he only chuckled. He would not even take it from the
cupboard. ‘No, no, Mr Harris,’ he said with his head to the side,
flicking up his abominable snuff; ‘it is an heirloom older than any here,
and I am not selling.’ And the galling thing is that he doesn’t even
know he has a Tudor Cup, nor what a Tudor Cup can fetch in Sotheby’s.”
“Ah, you should have had the money with you, Harris,” said his partner.
“Always show the money, I say; it talks for you through a
speaking-trumpet. By heavens, I will go myself to Scotland and have that
Tudor Cup, if I have to steal it!”