“Eh! Well, my dear Nell, Cornhill’s a good step from here.”
“But you can take a cab,” cried the young lady. “I’ve plenty of money, Dick, and do you think I shall grudge it for such a purpose? Go at once, Richard, dear, and take a cab.”
She pulled a purse from her pocket, and tried to force it into the young man’s hand; but he shook his head.
“I’m afraid the shipbroker’s office would be closed, Nelly,” he said. “We’d better wait till to-morrow morning.”
But the young lady would not hear of this. She was sure the shipbroker’s office wouldn’t close so early, she said, with as much authority as if she had been intimately acquainted with the habits of shipbrokers; and she bustled Dick down stairs and out of the house before he well knew where he was.
He returned in about an hour and a half, very tired and dusty; having preferred his independence and an omnibus to the cab offered by Eleanor.
“It’s no use, Nelly,” he said despondently, as he threw off his hat, and ran his dirty fingers through the rumpled shock of dusty brown hair that had been blown about his face by the hot August wind, “the office was just closing, and I couldn’t get anything out of the clerks. I was never so cruelly snubbed in my life.”
Miss Vane looked very much disappointed, and was silent for a minute or so. Then her face suddenly brightened, and she patted Richard’s shoulder with a gesture expressive of patronage and encouragement.
“Never mind, Dick,” she said, smilingly, “you shall go again to-morrow morning early; and I’ll go with you. We’ll see if these shipbroker’s clerks will snub me!”
“Snub you!” cried Richard Thornton, in a rapture of admiration. “I think that, of all the members of the human family, paid officials are the most unpleasant and repulsive; but I don’t think there’s a clerk in Christendom who could snub you, Miss Vane.”