“Oh,” he said. “Nothing extraordinary. She had to leave London for a time, and gave me her pet canary to take charge of while she was away.”
“But it wasn’t your fault,” I urged.
“No, perhaps not,” he agreed; “but it created a coldness which others were not slow to take advantage of.”
“I offered her the cat, too,” he added, but more to himself than to me.
We sat and smoked in silence. I felt that the consolations of a stranger would sound weak.
“Piebald horses are lucky, too,” he observed, knocking the ashes from his pipe against the window sash. “I had one of them once.”
“What did it do to you?” I enquired.
“Lost me the best crib I ever had in my life,” was the simple rejoinder. “The governor stood it a good deal longer than I had any right to expect; but you can’t keep a man who is always drunk. It gives a firm a bad name.”
“It would,” I agreed.
“You see,” he went on, “I never had the head for it. To some men it would not have so much mattered, but the very first glass was enough to upset me. I’d never been used to it.”