"Yes, I'll send him a clock. Wait till I ask where they live."
She rose and approached the lady at the counting-house; a brisk conversation ensued, the lady speaking much with her hands and eyes, which she raised alternately to heaven.
Fanny came back looking sorrowful. "He's gone," she said; "I never could have thought it!"
"Why should he not go?"
"Yes, but he went with the spoons and forks and things, and there was no girl at Soho."
"Never trust those plausible gentlemen who look like Italian Counts," said James Hancock, not entirely displeased with the melodramatic news.
"Whom is one to trust?" asked Fanny, with the air of a woman whose life's illusion is shattered.
James Hancock couldn't quite say. "Trust me," rose to his lips, but the sentiment was not uttered, partly because it would have been too previous, and partly because Hermann had just placed before him an enormous ice-cream.
"You are not eating your ice!"
"It's too hot—ah, um—I mean it's too cold," said Mr Hancock, waking from a moment's reverie. "That is to say, I scarcely ever eat ices." The fact that a sweet vanilla ice was simply food and drink to the gout was a dietetic truism he did not care to utter.