"Yes, it is Locke; and surely you're my old friend Jemmy Downes? Shake hands. What an unexpected pleasure to meet you again!"
"Werry unexpected pleasure. Tip us your daddle! Delighted—delighted, as I was a saying, to be of the least use to yer. Take a caulker? Summat heavy, then? No? 'Tak' a drap o' kindness yet, for auld langsyne?"
"You forget I was always a teetotaller."
"Ay," with a look of unfeigned pity. "An' you're a going to lend us a hand? Oh, ah! perhaps you'd like to begin? Here's a most beautiful uniform, now, for a markis in her Majesty's Guards; we don't mention names—tarn't businesslike. P'r'aps you'd like best to work here to-night, for company—'for auld langsyne, my boys;' and I'll introduce yer to the gents up-stairs to-morrow."
"No," I said; "I'll go up at once, if you've no objection."
"Och, thin, but the sheets isn't aired—no—faix; and I'm thinking the gentleman as is a going isn't gone yet."
But I insisted on going up at once; and, grumbling, she followed me. I stopped on the landing of the second floor, and asked which way; and seeing her in no hurry to answer, opened a door, inside which I heard the hum of many voices, saying in as sprightly a tone as I could muster, that I supposed that was the workroom.
As I had expected, a fetid, choking den, with just room enough in it for the seven or eight sallow, starved beings, who, coatless, shoeless, and ragged, sat stitching, each on his truckle-bed. I glanced round; the man whom I sought was not there.
My heart fell; why it had ever risen to such a pitch of hope I cannot tell; and half-cursing myself for a fool, in thus wildly thrusting my head into a squabble, I turned back and shut the door, saying—
"A very pleasant room, ma'am, but a leetle too crowded."