Old Mr. Jones had, I say, been gathered to all the other Joneses who had gone before him, and the two young Messrs. Jones--one aged forty-five and the other thirty-nine--decided that his decease marked a period in the existence of Cazalet's when a change ought to be made. That change was to take a shape, however, in the first instance, which caused a vast number of the people who banked with them, as well as all their senior clerks--many of them nearly as old as the late Jones himself--to shake their heads and to wonder why that late Jones did not burst forth corporeally from his grave, or, at the very least, appear in the spirit, to forbid the desecration that was about to take place. For the old house was to be pulled down--ruthlessly sacrificed to the spirit of the times, and a bran-new one was to be built up in its place! "Well," said the ancient chief cashier--who had been there boy and man since 1843, and had grown old, and also tobacco-and-spirit-stained, during the evenings of a life spent in the service of Cazalet's--when he received the first intimation of this terrible news, "if that's going to happen it's time I was off. Lor' bless me! a new house! Well, then, they'll require some new clerks. They don't want a wreck like me in such a fine new modern building as they're going to shove up." "Why, Mr. Creech," said a much younger _employé_ of Cazalet's, a youth who came in airily every morning from Brixton, and was supposed to be the best lawn-tennis player in that suburb, "that's just why you ought to remain; you'll give the new show a fine old crusted air of respectability; you're a relic, you are, of the good old days. They'll never be able to do without you." But Mr. Creech only grunted, and, it being one o'clock in the day when this conversation took place, he lifted up the lid of his desk, took some sandwiches out of a paper packet, and, applying his lips to a small flask, diffused a genial aroma of sherry-and-water around him. Yet, as he thus partook of his lunch, he wagged his head in a melancholy manner and thought how comfortable he had been for the best part of his life in the old, dingy, dirty-windowed house; it having been a standing rule of Cazalet's that the windows were never to be cleaned, and rumour had it that they had not been touched since the house was built. That the firm "would never be able to do without him," as his cock-a-hoop junior had remarked, seemed, indeed, to be the case, and received exemplification there and then. For at that moment a bell rang in the inner sanctum where the brothers sat, and a moment afterwards the office-boy who had answered it told Mr. Creech that the "pardners wanted to see 'im;" whereon he gulped down a last drop of the sherry-and-water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and went in to them, wondering "what was up now?"