“Well, come along and see him.”
“Not me,” said Mr. Braddock. “I’ve had ten minutes of him and it has sufficed. Also, I’ve got to be buzzing up to town. I’m dining out. Besides, it’s you he wants to see, not me.”
“I wonder what he wants to see me about.”
“Must be something important to bring him charging down here. Well, I’ll be moving, old boy. Mustn’t keep you. Thanks for a very pleasant afternoon.”
Willoughby Braddock took his departure; and Sam, having gone to his bedroom and found a pair of grey flannel trousers, returned to the lower regions and went into the drawing-room.
He had not expected to find his visitor in anything approaching a mood of sunniness, but he was unprepared for the red glare of hate and hostility in the eyes which seared their way through him as he entered. It almost seemed as if Lord Tilbury imagined the distressing happenings of the last quarter of an hour to be Sam’s fault.
“So there you are!” said Lord Tilbury.
He had been standing with an air of coyness behind the sofa; but now, as he observed the trousers over Sam’s arm, he swooped forward feverishly and wrenched them from him. He pulled them on, muttering thickly to himself; and this done, drew himself up and glared at his host once more with that same militant expression of loathing in his eyes.
He seemed keenly alive to the fact that he was not looking his best. Sam was a long-legged man, and in the case of Lord Tilbury, Nature, having equipped him with an outsize in brains, had not bothered much about his lower limbs. The borrowed trousers fell in loose folds about his ankles, brushing the floor. Nor did they harmonise very satisfactorily with the upper portion of a morning suit. Seeing him, Sam could not check a faint smile of appreciation.
Lord Tilbury saw the smile, and it had the effect of increasing his fury to the point where bubbling rage becomes a sort of frozen calm.