But I caught up my bag, swung off the step, and, squeezing between a horse's wet nose and the back of a brougham, gained the pavement, where a red-baize carpet divided the ranks of the crowd.
"Hullo!" One of the policemen put out a hand to detain me.
"It's all right," I assured him; "I belong to the house." It seemed a safer explanation than that the house belonged to me.
"Is it the ices?" he asked.
But I ran up the porchway, eager to get to grips with Trewlove.
On the threshold a young and extremely elegant footman confronted me.
"Where is Trewlove?" I demanded.
The footman was glorious in a tasselled coat and knee-breeches, both of bright blue. He wore his hair in powder, and eyed me with suspicion if not with absolute disfavour.
"Where is Trewlove?" I repeated, dwelling fiercely on each syllable.
The ass became lightly satirical. "Well we may wonder," said he; "search the wide world over! But reely and truly you've come to the wrong 'ouse this time. Here, stand to one side!" he commanded, as a lady in the costume of La Pompadour, followed by an Old English Gentleman with an anachronistic Hebrew nose, swept past me into the hall. He bowed deferentially while he mastered their names, "Mr. and Mrs. Levi-Levy!" he cried, and a second footman came forward to escort them up the stairs. To convince myself that this was my own house I stared hard at a bust of Havelock—my late uncle's chief, and for religious as well as military reasons his beau ideal of a British warrior.