“That’s your friend, isn’t it? My, he must be a swell!”
“Which of all them places is in this city?” asked the man.
“Why, Carlton Club and Gloucester Gate, of course, you gaby!”
“Where’s Gloucester Gate?” said Airley heavily, without resenting her epithet.
She told him how to get to it. He bade her good-day, murmured a hoarse and tardy “thank ye,” and went out of her doorway.
The woman looked after him with some misgiving in her mind.
“I wish I hadn’t give him the address,” she thought; “he looks like an anarchist, he do.”
She was tempted for the moment to go and tell the policeman at the corner to keep an eye on this stranger, but there were no serious grounds for doing so, and the police were not beloved by those who work for their living in great cities.
So Robert Airley went on his way unnoticed, one of the many ill-fed, ill-clad, gaunt, and weary-looking men who may be counted by tens of thousands in the London streets, and who sometimes are ill-bred and disrespectful enough to die on their pavements. He was not an anarchist, but had been always a strictly law-abiding and long-suffering man, and was by nature very patient and tender-hearted. But a direful purpose had entered into him now, and worked havoc in his gentle breast, and changed his very nature. He walked on through the maze of many streets which divided the humble eating-house from the precincts of Hyde Park. It was four in the afternoon, and the traffic was great and the carriages were countless. But he scarcely noticed them except to get out of their way, and he went on steadily down Piccadilly with its close-packed throngs, and onward past Apsley House and the French Embassy, until he approached what a cabman standing on the curbstone told him were Gloucester Gate and Harrenden House. When he saw its magnificent frontage, its gilded gates, its stately portals, he looked up at them all, and a bitter fleeting smile crossed his face for an instant.
Blasted Blizzard dwelt there!