Then how heavily, heavily did the weary hours pass away; and Curtis more than half regretted that his friend O'Blunderbuss did not call upon him. He felt that, for the pleasure of his society, he would overlook and forget the treatment he had received at his hands. But the gallant officer came not; and, what with another examination of the pictures, a complete spell of the advertisements (the news being already disposed of) in the Times, and a cigar or two, Frank managed to dispose of the time, though miserably enough, until five o'clock.
Mr. Pepperton then came back; and Frank awaited the report in excruciating suspense.
"Well, my dear fellow," said the lawyer, flinging himself in a chair as if regularly worn out by hard work, "we have lost the point; but we have this consolation——"
"What?" demanded Curtis, in the anxious hope of seeing another loophole promising emancipation.
"Why—that we as nearly gained it as possible," returned Pepperton. "It was old Justice Foozlehem that was at Chambers to-day; and, when I argued the point, he rubbed his nose with the feather-end of the pen—he always does that when the thing is very ticklish——"
"Damn Judge Foozlehem!" emphatically cried Mr. Frank Curtis. "A miss is as good as a mile; and that was what the Prince of Malabar said when my bullet whistled close by his ear at that duel which him and me fought at Boulogne three years ago. But, to speak seriously of business—I suppose that there's nothing left for me to do——"
"Save to pay the debt or go to the Bench," added the lawyer, putting the alternatives in as nut-shell a compass as possible.
"Well—the Bench it must be, then!" ejaculated Frank.
"I will take out the habeas to-morrow," observed Mr. Pepperton; "and at about five o'clock in the afternoon the tipstaff will be at Serjeant's Inn waiting for you—or may be, you'll have to go over to him at the public-house opposite."
Curtis invited the lawyer to pass the evening with him: but Mr. Pepperton was engaged elsewhere; and the prisoner was therefore compelled to drink and smoke in solitude, occasionally varying the occupation by another spell at the Times—another long gaze of envy from the window—and another scrutiny of the pictures.