During the delivery of this speech Bracy had listened in an exaggerated theatrical attitude of entranced attention, and at its conclusion he exclaimed, in a voice so intensely impassioned that it would have ensured his success at any of the minor theatres—
“Oh! speak again; let mine enraptured ear
Drink the sweet accents of thy silvery voice.”
Which sentiment procured for him the applause of a small male spectator of the tender age of ten years, clad in much dirt and a pair of adult trousers on their last legs in every sense of the term, who expressed his approval by nodding complacently and remarking, “Wery well done; ancore, I says.”
“Come along,” exclaimed Frere, seizing Bracy’s arm and almost forcing him away; “you’ll have a crowd round you directly. Your companion has taken himself off long ago.”
“So he has,” returned Bracy, looking round. “Now I call that mean, to desert a friend in difficulties; more especially,” he added, as they walked away together, “as the said difficulties were undertaken wholly and solely on his account.”
“On his account?” returned Frere in surprise; “why, I should have thought the mighty De Grandeville was the last person likely to appreciate a street row.”
“For which reason I never lose an opportunity of involving him in one,” replied Bracy, rubbing his hands with mischievous glee. “He can’t bear walking with me, for I always get him into some scrape or other, and injure his dignity irreparably for the time being. Why, the last severe frost we had I met him in Pall Mall, drew him on to talk of architecture, pointed out to him a mistake which didn’t exist in the front of one of the club-houses, and while he was looking up at it beguiled him on to a slide and upset him, quite inadvertently, into an itinerant orange basket, just as Lady B————, with whom he has a bowing acquaintance, was passing in her carriage. Look at him now, prancing along as if all Regent Street belonged to him! Walk a little faster, and we shall overtake him; and, by the way, lend me that wonderful cotton umbrella of yours; I’ll make him carry it right down to the Home Office. You are bound for Westminster, are you not?”
“What made you guess that?” asked Frere, handing him the umbrella.
“Because there’s a meeting at the Palaeontological to-day at three, and I know you’re one of their great guns,” was the reply.