Westland’s insistence upon this theme had no purpose other than to divert Christian’s attention while they passed the Empire. He was tired, and profoundly disinclined to any renewal of the discussion about the promenade. He encountered with vague surprise, therefore, the frowning glance which Christian, half halting, bent upon him. The young man’s displeasure was marked, but Dicky for the life of him could not imagine why. He tightened his hold on the other’s arm and quickened their pace.
But Christian, after a few yards, suddenly withdrew his arm altogether. “I do not like to walk so fast,” he said, with a sharp note in his voice.
Dicky regarded him with puzzled apprehension. “What’s up, old man?” he asked, almost pleadingly. “Has anything gone wrong?”
Christian, still with knitted brows, parted his lips to speak. Then he seemed to reconsider his intention, and let his face soften as he paused. “No—nothing at all,” he replied, after a moment. He smiled a little to reassure the other. “It was nothing at all,” he repeated. “Only I am nervous and excited to-night—this morning, I should say—and my head is full of projects. It is twelve hours since you came to me—and the whole world has changed meanwhile. I see everything different. I am not altered to your eyes—but none the less, I am not at all, in any respect, the man you took to dine with you. You have not observed anything—but it is a revolution that has occurred under your very nose, Mr. Dicky Westland.”
“I’m too sleepy to observe anything,” the other declared. “I couldn’t tell a revolution from a—from a hot-potato can.”
The comparison had forced itself upon Westland’s jaded mind through the medium of his weary eyes. There before them, by the curb at the corner, stood the dingy wheeled-oven of the streets, the sullen red glow of its lower door making a strange patch of fiery light upon the ragged trousers of the man in charge. He was a dirty and undersized creature, and he looked up at the two young gentlemen in evening dress with a speculative, yet hardly hopeful, eye.
Christian stopped short. “Ah, this is very good,” he said, with a brightening face. “I have never eaten a potato from a can.”
Dicky sighed, but resigned himself with only a languid protest: “You have to eat so much else besides the potato,” he commented dolefully.
The man opened an upper door, and then drew from under the machine a twisted wad of old newspaper, which, being unwound, revealed a gray heap of salt. “How many, cap’n?” he demanded, briefly.
Christian had been glancing across the Circus meanwhile—to where, in the misty vagueness of dawn, Piccadilly opened between its tall, shapely corners, and beyond, the curved yellowish sweep of Regent Street began. The dim light revealed some lurking figures to his eyes.