Each pair of eyes was riveted on the other. For both men thought of the evening when Mike had received the letter notifying that Lady Seeley had left him five thousand a year, and Frank had read in the evening paper that Lady Mount Rorke had given birth to a son. Frank was, as usual, voluble and communicative. He dilated on the painfulness of the salutations of the people he had met on the way going from the station to Mount Rorke; and, instead of walking straight in, as in old times, he had to ask the servant to take his name.
"Burton, the old servant who had known me since I was a boy, seemed terribly cut up, and he was evidently very reluctant to speak the message. 'I'm very sorry, Mr. Frank,' he said, 'but his lordship says he is too unwell to see any one to-day, sir; he is very sorry, but if you would write' … If I would write! think of it, I who was once his heir, and used the place as if it were mine! Poor old Burton was quite overcome. He tried to ask me to come into the dining-room and have some lunch. If I go there again I shall be asked into the servants' hall. And at that moment the nurse came, wheeling the baby in the perambulator through the hall, going out for an airing. I tried not to look, but couldn't restrain my eyes, and the nurse stopped and said, 'Now then, dear, give your hand to the gentleman, and tell him your name.' The little thing looked up, its blue eyes staring out of its sallow face, and it held out the little putty-like hand. Poor old Burton turned aside, he couldn't stand it any longer, and walked into the dining-room."
"And how did you get away?" asked Mike, who saw his friend's misfortune in the light of an exquisite chapter in a novel. "How sad the old place must have seemed to you!"
"You are thinking how you could put it in a book—how brutal you are!"
"I assure you you are wrong. I can't help trying to realize your sensations, but that doesn't prevent me from being very sorry for you, and I'm sure I shall be very pleased to help you. Do you want any money? Don't be shy about saying yes. I haven't forgotten how you helped me."
"I really don't like to ask you, you've been very good as it is.
However, if you could spare me a tenner?"
"Of course I can. Let's send these jarvies away, and come into my hotel, and I'll write you a cheque."
The sum Frank asked for revealed to Mike exactly the depth to which he had sunk since they had last met. Small as it was, however, it seemed to have had considerable effect in reviving Frank's spirits, and he proceeded quite cheerfully into the tale of his misfortune. Now it seemed to strike him too in quite a literary light, and he made philosophic comments on its various aspects, as he might on the hero of a book which he was engaged on or contemplated writing.
"No," he said, "you were quite wrong in supposing that I waited to look back on the old places. I got out of the park through a wood so as to avoid the gate-keeper. In moments of great despair we don't lapse into pensive contemplation." … He stopped to pull at the cigar Mike had given him, and when he had got it well alight, he said, "It was really most dramatic, it would make a splendid scene in a play; you might make him murder the baby."
Half an hour after Mike bade his friend good-bye, glad to be rid of him.