“I’m glad you do,” I murmured. “I wish I did.”
“Oh, that will be all right,” Fox comforted. “I dare say Callan has rather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain’t used to it. But you won’t find the others as trying. There’s Churchill now, he’s your next. You’ll have to mind him. You’ll find him a decent chap. Not a bit of side on him.”
“What Churchill?” I asked.
“The Foreign Minister.”
“The devil,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll find him all right,” Fox reassured; “you’re to go down to his place to-morrow. It’s all arranged. Here we are. Hop out.” He suited his own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta steps of the Hour’s home. He left me to pay the cabman.
When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebody through folding doors.
“Come along,” he said, breathlessly. “Can’t see him,” he added to a little boy, who held a card in his hands. “Tell him to go to Mr. Evans. One’s life isn’t one’s own here,” he went on, when he had reached his own room.
It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold—Louis Quinze, or something of the sort—with very new decorations after Watteau covering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had already begun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a matchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.
“Hullo, Evans,” Fox shouted across it, “just see that man from Grant’s, will you? Heard from the Central News yet?”