ROBERT GRIMSHAW was pushing the electric button beside the Leicesters’ entry when, hatless, the daylight falling on his ruffled hair, Dudley Leicester flung open the door and ran down the street.
“Oh, go after him; go after him!” Pauline cried from the hall.
If Dudley Leicester had done anything at all in his life it was to run at school. Thus it was a full minute before Grimshaw came to the door of the little dark hat-ironing shop, in the middle of which Leicester stood, leaning over the counter, holding by the waistcoat a small man with panic-stricken blue eyes. Afterwards he heard that Leicester had asked where his man Saunders was. But for the moment he had ceased to shake the little hatter. And then, suddenly, he asked:
“Are you the chap who rang up 4,259 Mayfair?”
“Sir! sir!” the little man cried out. Dudley Leicester shook him and shook him: a white band-box fell from the counter and rolled almost into the street.
“Are you? Are you?” Dudley Leicester cried out incessantly.
And when the little man screamed: “No! no!” Leicester seized the heavy rounded smoothing-iron and raised it to the height of his arm so that it struck the brown, smoked ceiling. The little man ducked beneath the counter, his agonized eyes gazing upwards.
But at Grimshaw’s cool, firm grasp upon his wrists, Leicester sank together. He passed his hand so tightly down his face that the colour left it, to return in a swift flush.
“I’ve got cobwebs all over my face,” he muttered, “beastly, beastly cobwebs.”
He did not utter another word. Grimshaw, taking him firmly by the arm above the elbow led him back to his house, of which the white door still stood open.