"Vasari! Dino Vasari! can it be he?" said Brian, throwing down his newspaper. "What brings him to London?"
Then it occurred to him that Father Cristoforo's long letter might have contained information concerning Dino's visit to London: possibly he had been asked to do the young Italian some service, which, of course, he had been unable to render as he had not read the letter. He felt doubly vexed at his own carelessness as he thought of this possibility, and resolved to go to the hospital and see whether the man who had been wounded was Dino Vasari or not. And then he forgot all about the newspaper paragraph, and lost himself in sad reflections concerning the unexpected end of his connection with the Herons.
Arrived in London, he found out a modest lodging, and began to arrange his plans for the future. A fit of restlessness seemed to have come upon him. He could not bear to think of staying any longer in England. He paid a visit next morning to an Emigration Agency Office, asking whether the agents could direct him to the best way of obtaining suitable work in the Colonies. He did not care where he went or what he did; his preference was for work in the open air, because he still at times felt the effect of that brain-fever which had so nearly ended his existence at San Stefano; but his physique was not exactly of the kind which was most suited to bush-clearing and sheep-farming. This he was told, and informed, moreover, that so large a number of clerks arrived yearly in Australia and America, that the market in that sort of labour was over-stocked, and that, if he was a clerk, he had a better chance in the Old World than in the New.
"I am not a clerk; I have lately been a tutor," said Brian.
References?
He could refer them to his late employer.
A degree? Oxford or Cambridge?
And there the questions ceased to be answered satisfactorily. He could not tell them that he had been to Oxford, because he dared not refer them to the name under which he studied at Balliol. He hesitated, blundered a little—he certainly had never mastered the art of lying with ease and fluency—and created so unfavourable an impression in the mind of the emigration agent that that gentleman regarded him with suspicion from that moment, and apparently ceased to wish to afford him any aid.
"I am very sorry," he said, politely, "but I don't think that we have anything that would suit you. There is a college at Dunedin where they want a junior master, but there, a man with a good degree and—hum—unimpeachable antecedents would be required. People out there are in want of men with a trade: not of clerks, nor of poor professional men."
"Then I must go as a hodman or a breaker of stones," said Brian, "for I mean to go."