"I did apply to him once," replied Roland, "and he sent me off with a flea in my ear. I said then, I'd never ask him for any thing again, though it were to keep me from starving."
Vincent Yorke smiled. "Look here," said he; "you take him in his genial moods. Go up to him now; he'll just have dined. If anything can be got out of him, that's the time."
Mr. Vincent Yorke hit upon this quite as much to get rid of Roland, as in any belief in its efficacy. In the main what he said was true--that Sir Richard's after-dinner moods were his genial ones; but that Roland had not the ghost of a chance of being helped, he very well knew. That unsophisticated voyager, however, took it all in.
"I'll run up at once," he said. "I'm so much obliged to you, Vincent. I say, are you not soon going to be married? I heard so."
"Eh--yes," replied Vincent, with frigid coldness, relapsing into himself and the fine gentleman.
"I wish you the best of good luck," returned Roland, heartily shaking the somewhat unwilling hand with a grip that he might have learned at Port Natal. "And I hope she'll make you as good a wife as I know somebody else will make me. Good night, Vincent, I'm off."
Vincent nodded. It struck him that, with all his drawbacks and deficiencies, Roland was rather a nice young fellow.
Outside the club door stood a hansom. Roland, in his eagerness and haste, was only kept from bolting into it by the slight deterrent accident of having no change in his pocket to pay the fare. He did not lose much. The speed at which he tore up Regent Street might have kept pace with the wheels of most cabs; and the resounding knock and ring he gave at Sir Richard's door in Portland Place, must surely have caused the establishment to think it announced the arrival of a fire-escape.
The door was flung open on the instant, as if to an expected visitor. But that Roland was not the one waited for, was proved by the surprise of the servant. He arrested the further entrance.
"You are not the doctor!"