CHAPTER VII.
Mr. William Wyvern In Meath Street.
I.
George spent the night—such of it as remained after his bitter moanings outside his Mary's lodging—with the Mr. Franklyn who had accompanied him on that little “stroll up west” that had terminated in the cab adventure nearly three months before. Of all his student friends who would give him a bed, Mr. Franklyn, because in a way associated with his Mary, had come most prominently into his mind. That same association gave him a lead from which to pour out his reply to Mr. Franklyn's rallying, as they sat at supper, upon his gloom.
“You remember that day after the July exam, when we went up west together?” he began.
Mr. Franklyn remembered; in some gloom shook his head over the recollection. “That waitress you left me with in the shop,” said Mr. Franklyn sadly, “she—”
“Oh, hang the waitress! Listen, Franklyn, After I left you I turned up past the Marble Arch—” He proceeded with some account of the love between him and his Mary; skipped all details relating to the cat; came to the impending marriage; sought advice upon the prospects of a man marrying on a locum's earnings.
Mr. Franklyn listened with great sympathy. “It's a rum thing you should be placed like that, George,” he said. “I'm in just the same position.”
George exclaimed eagerly—in love, youth warms to a companion—“You are!”
“Well, not exactly,” Mr. Franklyn admitted. “Very nearly. I've got myself into a brute of a fix over a girl in the lager-beer garden at Earl's Court. She—”
George bounced from the table, seized his hat. “Who cares a damn about your lager-beer girls?” he shouted; slammed from the house.
It was then, while Mr. Franklyn laboriously indited a letter in reply to one received from the lager-beer girl's mother, that George paced Meath Street.