The ship drew out into the harbour and I leaned hard on my stick and wondered drearily how long I was likely to live. Oh, I admit the shamefulness of my unmanly state! I might have been drying the orphan's tear or making Morris chairs or purifying local politics, but I wasn't.
Tip Elder walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Well, that baby's face is washed!" he said cheerily, "as my mother puts it. And I hope it's going to turn out all right. But I don't believe you or I would be in Roger's shoes for a good deal, would we?"
I turned on him fiercely.
"Speak for yourself, Elder!" I cried. "I'd give most of this life that I know about and all of the next that you don't, to be for a little while in Roger's shoes! Understand that!"
And brushing by him and utterly neglecting Sue and the Wolcott Searses, I jumped into a waiting cab and hurried away from that departing vessel, with two-thirds of what I loved in the world on her deck.
I took one last look at our old rooms, bare and clean, now, for my things were sold and Roger's stored; I gave all my clothes to the house valet, to his intense gratitude, and when, with a nervous blow of my favourite cane—a gift from Roger—in an effort to beat the pile of cloth on the floor into symmetrical shape, the stick broke in the middle, I came as near to an hysterical laugh as I ever came in my life.
"Take all the other sticks, Hodgson," I said huskily, "and the racquets, if you want them. And give the rod to the night porter—Richard fishes, I know. And take the underwear, too—yes, all of it!"
"And the trunk, sir? Where would you wish——"
"O Lord, take the trunk!" I burst out, for the familiar labels, ay, the very dints in the brass lock, carried only sour memories to me, now.