“Perhaps,” answered the strange man; “perhaps you may, sir.”
“Well,” said our friend, the young student, “don’t be at all afraid to speak out. Tell me your business, although I have myself an idea as to what it may be. Have you got ‘The Thing?’”
“Doun’t know, sir, what you mean.”
“Ah! not an old hand at the trade, I perceive. You were never here before, perhaps?”
“No,” said the stranger.
“And don’t know what to say?”
“No,” said the stranger. And the bashful man again turned his gloomy downcast optics to the ground, and appeared also as if he didn’t very well know or to be able to make up his mind as to what he should do with those hands of his, which were not made for kid gloves—perhaps for skin of another kind rather.
And shouldn’t this hardened and callous-hearted student have been sorry for a man in such confusion? But he wasn’t; nay, he evidently had no sympathy whatever with his refinement.
“Why, man, don’t you speak out?” he said somewhat impatiently.
“There’s somebody coming through the Square there,” was the reply, as the man looked furtively to a side.