"There's a fortune in it," said Mr. Glorie, pointing to a bubbling grease-pot. "Yes, young sir, a vast fortune."
"What is the speciality?" Archie ventured to enquire.
"The speciality, young sir?" replied Mr. Glorie, his face relaxing into something as near a smile as it would permit of. "The speciality, sir, is SOAP. A transparent soap. A soap, young sir, that is destined to revolutionise the world of commerce, and bring my star to the ascendant after struggling for two long decades with the dark clouds of adversity."
So this was the mystery. Archie was henceforward, so it appeared, to live in an atmosphere of scented soap; his hope must centre in bubbles. He was to assist this Mr. Glorie's star to rise to the zenith, while his own fortune might sink to nadir. And he had paid his premium. It was swallowed up and simmering in that ugly old grease-pot, and except for the miserable salary he received from Mr. Glorie he might starve.
Poor Archie! He certainly did not share his employer's enthusiasm, and on this particular evening he did not walk home on feathers, and when he sat down to supper his face must have appeared to Sarah quite as long and lugubrious as Mr. Glorie's; for she raised her hands and said:
"Lawk-a-doodle, sir! What's the matter? Have ye killed anybody?"
"Not yet," answered Archie; "but I almost feel I could."
He stuck to his work, however, like a man; but that work became more and more allied to soap, and the front shop hardly knew him any more.
He had informed the fellows at the club-room that he was employed at last; that he was apprenticed to the drug trade. But the soap somehow leaked out, and more than once, when he was introduced to some new-comer, he was styled—
"Mr. Broadbent," and "something in soap."