Here the clock struck four, and the red-nosed man, who had also a stiff leg, put on his hat, and stumped out of the office.
"Now we can talk," said Lowndes, shutting the door, giving Harry a chair, and sitting down himself. "He'll be gone ten minutes. It's his whisky-time; he has a Scotch whisky every hour as regularly as the clock strikes. Wonderful man, Bacchus, for I never saw him a penn'orth the worse. Some day he'll go pop. But never mind him, Ringrose, and never mind the Company; tell us how the world's been using you, my boy; that's more to the point."
So Harry told him about the accepted verses, and Gordon Lowndes not only promised to tell his daughter, but was himself most emphatic in encouraging Harry to go on as he had begun. It might be his true vocation after all. If he wrote a book and made a hit it would be a better thing even than the Secretaryship of the H.C.S. & T.S.A. The delay there was particularly hard lines on Harry. Lowndes only hoped he was letting no chances slip meanwhile.
"It is always conceivable," said he, "that my aristocratic directors may each have a loafing younger son whom they may want to shove into the billet. You may depend upon me, Ringrose, to resist such jobbery tooth-and-nail; but, if I were you, I wouldn't refuse the substance for the shadow; you could always chuck it up, you know, and join us just the same."
"Then you won't be offended," said Harry, greatly relieved, "if I tell you that I have had one or two other irons in the fire?"
"Offended, my boy? I should think you a duffer if you had not."
In another minute Harry had made a clean breast of his other journeys to the City, and was recounting the latest of those miserable experiences when Lowndes cut him short.
"What!" cried he, "your father paid for the fellow's stamps, and he refused to pay for yours?"
"We never got so far as that," said Harry bitterly. "He wanted a premium with me, and that settled it. He said three hundred guineas was the usual thing, but in consideration of certain obligations he had once been under to my father (he wasn't such a fool as to go into particulars), he would take me for a hundred and fifty. And he made a tremendous favour of that. He expected me to go down on my knees with gratitude, I daresay, but I just told him that a hundred and fifty was as far beyond me as three hundred, and said good afternoon and came away. Mind you, I don't blame him. Why should I expect so much for so little? He's no worse than any of the rest; they're all the same, and I don't blame any of them. Who am I that I should go asking favours of any one of them? My God, I've asked my last!"
"You're your father's son, that's who you are," said Gordon Lowndes. "What your father did for this skunk of a solicitor, he should be the first man to do for you. What's his name, by the way?"