"You think you'll get it?"
"I've not much doubt."
Carroll made no reply to this. Vane was capable and forceful; but his abilities were of a practical rather than a diplomatic order, and he was occasionally addicted to somewhat headstrong action. Knowing that he had a very cunning antagonist intriguing against him, his companion had misgivings.
"Shall we walk back to the hotel?" he suggested.
"No," answered Vane; "I'll go across and see how Celia Hartley's getting on. I'm afraid I've been forgetting her."
"Then I'll come too. You may need me; there are matters which you're not to be trusted to deal with alone."
Just then Nairn came down the steps and waved his hand to them.
"Ye will no forget that Mrs. Nairn is expecting both of ye this evening."
He passed on, and they set off together across the city toward the district where Celia lived. Though the quarter in question may have been improved out of existence since, a few years ago rows of low-rented shacks stood upon mounds of sweating sawdust which had been dumped into a swampy hollow. Leaky, frail and fissured, they were not the kind of places anyone who could help it would choose to live in; but Vane found the sick girl still installed in one of the worst of them. She looked pale and haggard; but she was busily at work upon some millinery; and the light of a tin lamp showed Drayton and Kitty Blake sitting near her. There were cracks in the thin, boarded walls, from which a faint resinous odor exuded, but it failed to hide the sour smell of the wet sawdust upon which the shack was built. The room, which was almost bare of furniture, felt damp and unwholesome.
"You oughtn't to be at work; you don't look fit," Vane said to Celia. He paused a moment, hesitating, before he added: "I'm sorry we couldn't find that spruce; but, as I told Drayton, we're going back to try again."