"Then get her to go up now and light the gas stove and lay the table. I'll bring in the provisions if she'll do that and make my bed for me. Tell her I know it's late, but——"
"That's all right, sir," interrupted the porter, a familiar but obliging soul; and when Harry returned in ten minutes, with his slices of pressed beef and his French rolls and butter, from the delightful shop round a couple of corners, the flat was lighted like a public-house, and you lost sight of your breath in the minute dining-room where the asbestos was reddening in the grate.
Yet it was a sorry home-coming, that put Harry painfully in mind of his last, and he felt very wistful and lonely when he had finished his supper and written a few lines to his mother. He came in from posting them with an ounce of birdseye, and dragged an easy chair from under its dust-sheet in the other room, and so arranged himself comfortably enough in front of the gas stove. But his first pipe for several weeks did no more for him than Weber's Last Waltz, which duly welcomed him through the ceiling. He was unused to solitude, and the morrow's interview with Lowndes sat heavily on his nerves. His one consolation was that it would take place before his mother's return. She must know nothing until he knew all. And he had begged her not to hurry back on his account.
In the sideboard that was so many sizes too large for the room—the schoolroom sideboard of the old home—he at last laid hands upon some whisky, and in his loneliness and suppressed excitement he certainly drank more than was good for him before going to bed. Immense and immediate confidence accrued, only to evaporate before it was wanted; and morning found him nervous, depressed, and dearly wishing that he had gone hot from Scrafton to Lowndes the day before. But the bravest man is he who goes trembling and yet smiling into action, and, after all, it was a sufficiently determined face that Harry Ringrose carried through the sloppy City streets that foggy forenoon.
In the outer office the same small clerk was perched on the same tall stool: but Bacchus sat solitary, in his top-coat and with a redder nose than ever, at the desk in the inner office, the door of which was standing open.
"Good-morning, Mr. Backhouse," said Harry entering. "Mr. Lowndes is out?"
"Very much out."
"Doesn't he come here now?"
"No."
"I'm sorry to trouble you, Mr. Backhouse, but can you tell me where I can find him?"