The cashier smiled a dry smile, and his voice sounded dry as he answered. "I don't know about the red tape, but I'm sorry to tell you we have no instructions from London to pay."
"What?" cried Val, reddening with annoyance. Several people writing cheques or waiting for money at the counter, looked up and continued to look. "You have no instructions?"
"No instructions to pay," repeated the cashier, putting on the last word an emphasis which sounded offensive to Loveland's ears, though he hastily assured himself that it could not possibly have any such meaning.
"This is very inconvenient," said Val, to whom Bridge and tips on shipboard had left exactly seventeen shillings, three pence halfpenny.
"I'm sorry for that," remarked the cashier, still more formally, more unsympathetically, and—one might almost have said—more disrespectfully, than before.
Loveland, though inclined to storm, reflected a moment. He had intended to sail on the Baltic, which was due to leave English shores only yesterday, and might not arrive at New York for seven or eight days. He had not given anyone notice—not even his mother—that he had changed his intention, and very likely the London papers had paragraphed him as a passenger on the Baltic's next trip. Nevertheless, he could not quite understand how that fact excused his London bank's delay in instructing their New York correspondents. They had had plenty of time to arrange his affairs before his sudden departure in the Mauretania, and by not doing so they were likely to make him a great deal of unnecessary trouble.
Again he thought of Cadwallader Hunter. In this instance, too, the man might have been useful.
"Well, I don't see why I should be made to suffer because the London and Southern Bank puts off till tomorrow what it ought to have done a week ago," said Loveland, beginning to be arrogant, though looking boyish, with his flushed face, and his white scar glimmering on its background of clear, ruddy-brown. "I must have some money, you know."
The cashier did not reply to this challenge, and his eyes expressed no interested consideration of the matter.
"You had better see your manager and explain the circumstances," pursued Val.