“It’s done for you,” said Pratt. “Now let’s go and get in your bets.”
“I’m afraid, Franky,” said Trevor, “that you are not only a mercenary man, but a great—I mean little coward.”
“Quite right—you’re quite right,” said Pratt. “I am mercenary because the money’s useful, and enables a man to pay his laundress; and as to being a coward, I am—a dreadful coward. I wouldn’t mind if it were only skin, that will grow again; but fancy being ragged about and muddied in tussle with that fellow! Why, my dear Dick, I should have been six or seven pounds out of pocket in no time.”
“I wonder who those girls were in the barouche,” said Trevor, after a pause.
“Daresay you do,” was the reply; “so do I. Sweet girls—very; but you may make yourself quite easy; you will never see either of them again.”
“Don’t know,” said Trevor, slowly. “This is a very little place, this world, and I have often run against people I knew in the most out-of-the-way places.”
“Yes, you may do so abroad,” said Pratt; “but here, in England, you never do anything of the kind, except in novels. I saw a girl once at the chrysanthemum show in the Temple, and hoped I should ran against her again some day, but I never did. She wasn’t so nice, though, as these.”
Trevor smiled, and then, encountering one or two gentlemen with whom he had made bets, a little pecuniary business followed, after which the friends strolled along the course.
“By the way,” said Trevor, “I was just thinking it rather hard upon our friend of the omnibus; those policemen pounced upon him and walked him off, without much consideration of the case. Well, I don’t want to see the fellow again; he made my blood boil to-day.”
“Then you will see him, you may depend upon it,” said Pratt. “That’s just the awkwardness of fate, or whoever the lady is that manages these matters. Owe a man ten pounds, and you will meet him every day like clock-work.”