Now suddenly, as he stood indetermined, and wondering if, after all, this quest was proper to his custom, the door of the shop opened, and there appeared in the aperture the figure of a young woman, speaking back, as she emerged, to someone within:—
“Yes, same place as the other, Doddington Grove. I say, I must hurry. So-long, Georgy!”
She ran out—a slight anæmic girl, a sempstress by her pallor, soberly dressed, but elaborate as to her head and low as to her neck—and, with a wondering stare at Gilead, sped on her way towards the tram terminus hard by. Regarding her retreat an instant, Gilead turned to see the figure of a man standing conning him from the shop-door.
He was a pert, wiry, truculent-looking young fellow, the very type of combative cockneyism. His nose was retroussé, his cheeks pink; an incipient red-gold moustache on his lip had been coaxed into two little upstanding stings or spikes; his cloth cap, tilted back from his forehead, revealed a rudimentary ‘cow-lick’, elaborated from a somewhat cropped head of the same Apollonian hue. He stood whistling softly, with his hands thrust loosely into his trouser pockets. Gilead stepped towards him.
“Jenniver?” he said. “Is that the name?”
“You may lay on it, my lord,” answered the young man, coolly blocking the way.
“O!” said Gilead; and produced his newspaper extract. “I came about an advertisement.”
The stranger nodded, eyeing the brown-paper parcel.
“Yus?” he said.
“I have a skin or two here of the sort you mention.”