"Yes."
"Well, don't mind what he says; try my remedy. Gout, my dear sir, is incurable with drugs, I've tried 'em. You try hot air baths and vegetarianism; it cured me. I don't say a strictly vegetarian diet, but just as little meat as you can take. I get it myself. Hancock, we're not so young as we were, and the wine and women of our youth revisit us; yes, the wine and women——"
He stopped. Fanny had just emerged from the shop.
The cabman who drove Sir Henry Tempest that day from Oxford Street to the Raleigh Club has not yet solved the problem as to "what the old gent, was laughing about."
"I'm awfully sorry to have kept you such a time," said Fanny, as they wandered away, "but those shopmen are so stupid. Who was that nice-looking old gentleman you were talking to?"
"That was Sir Henry Tempest; but he never struck me as being especially nice-looking. He is not a bad man in his way—but a bore; yes, very decidedly a bore."
"Come here," said Fanny, from whose facile mind the charms of Sir Henry Tempest had vanished—"Come here, and I will buy you something." She turned to a jeweller's shop.
"But, my dear child," said James, "I never wear jewellery—never."
"Oh, I don't mean really to buy you something, I only mean make belief—window-shopping, you know. I often go out by myself and buy heaps of things like that, watches and carriages, and all sorts of things. I enjoy it just as much as if I were buying them really; more, I think, for I don't get tired of them. Do you know that when I want a thing and get it I don't want it any more? I often get married like that."