"No, too hot I reckon—well for my part, give me a quiet game of bowls. Innocent mirth I don't find fault with, but I object to making myself a sort of circus for a lot of grinning urchins, who ought to be at school or somewhere." He came and stood beside Scarsdale. At any other time Scarsdale might have avoided Mr. Coombe, to-day he welcomed him. Even Coombe was a better companion than his own thoughts.
"A decent feller," Coombe thought, "no airs about him, a bit silent, I don't expect he gets much society where he comes from."
Thereafter Mr. Combe left Cutler and Jobson to their golf and attached himself to Scarsdale, and for long after the boastful Coombe would tell in City chop houses how he and his friend Sir Harold Scarsdale played golf together on Stretton Links.
"Walk," said Coombe, "why of course I'll walk, nothing like walking to get a man's weight down."
"I gather you don't do much walking, Mr. Coombe."
"Me?" said Coombe. "You should see me, all over the City I am, in one office out another up and down the stairs."
They lunched, the four of them, at a little Inn, lunched on bread and cheese and good English ale. Coombe called the pretty little maid who waited on them his dear. He chucked her under her dimpled chin and asked her how many sweethearts she had—a gay dog, Mr. Coombe, playful and ponderous, with no more vice in him than is in an honest British bulldog.
"Pretty girl," said Coombe; "I always said London wants beating for pretty girls. You see more pretty girls in ten minutes in the streets of London than you do in a day's journeying anywhere else. But next to London comes Sussex, I've seen 'em handsome enough in Kent and passable in Devonshire, but Sussex girls beat the best. There's a girl at Homewood, Lady Kathleen's maid I think she is, as pretty as a picture—Jobson and I saw her last night, didn't we, Jobson?"
Jobson blushed furiously.
"You did call my attention to a young woman, now I come to think of it, Coombe."