"My dear Dick!" said Rainham, "this is a pleasant surprise. I had not the remotest notion you were here."
"I thought you were at Bordighera, till Bullen told me of your arrival ten minutes ago," said Lightmark, with a frank laugh. "And how well——"
Rainham held up his hand—a very white, nervous hand with one ring of quaint pattern on the forefinger—deprecatingly.
"My dear fellow, I know exactly what you are going to say. Don't be conventional—don't say it. I have a fraudulent countenance if I do look well; and I don't, and I am not. I am as bad as I ever was."
"Well, come now, Rainham, at any rate you are no worse."
"Oh, I am no worse!" admitted the dry dock proprietor. "But, then, I could not afford to be much worse. However, my health is a subject which palls on me after a time. Tell me about yourself."
He looked up with a smile, in which an onlooker might have detected a spark of malice, as though Rainham were aware that his suggested topic was not without attraction to his friend. He was a slight man of middle height, and of no apparent distinction, and his face with all its petulant lines of lassitude and ill-health—the wear and tear of forty years having done with him the work of fifty—struck one who saw Philip Rainham for the first time by nothing so much as by his ugliness. And yet few persons who knew him would have hesitated to allow to his nervous, suffering visage a certain indefinable charm. The large head set on a figure markedly ungraceful, on which the clothes seldom fitted, was shapely and refined, although the features were indefensible, even grotesque. And his mouth, with its constrained thin lips and the acrid lines about it, was unmistakably a strong one. His deep-set eyes, moreover, of a dark gray colour, gleamed from under his thick eyebrows with a pleasant directness; while his smile, which some people called cynical, as his habit of speech most certainly was, was found by others extraordinarily sympathetic.
"Yes, tell me about yourself, Dick," he said again.
"I have done a picture, if that is what you mean, besides some portraits; I have worked down here like a galley slave for the last three months."
"And is the queer little estaminet in Soho still in evidence? Do the men of to-morrow still meet there nightly and weigh the claims of the men of to-day?"