“Hash, you old devil!” said Sam joyfully.
Mr. Todhunter licked his lips uncomfortably. He cast a swift glance over his shoulder, as if debating the practicability of a dive into the traffic. He endeavoured, without success, to loosen the grip of Sam’s hand on his coat sleeve.
“What are you wriggling for?” asked Sam, becoming aware of this.
“I’m not wriggling,” said Hash. He spoke huskily and in a tone that seemed timidly ingratiating. If the voice of Mr. Cornelius had resembled a druid priest’s, Clarence Todhunter’s might have been likened to that of the victim on the altar. “I’m not wriggling, Sam. What would I want to wriggle for?”
“Where did you spring from, Hash?”
Mr. Todhunter coughed.
“I was just coming from leaving a note for you, Sam, at that place Tilbury House, where you told me you’d be.”
“You’re a great letter writer, aren’t you?”
The allusion was not lost upon Mr. Todhunter. He gulped and his breathing became almost stertorous.
“I want to explain about that, Sam,” he said. “Explain, if I may use the term, fully. Sam,” said Mr. Todhunter thickly, “what I say and what I always have said is, when there’s been a little misunderstanding between pals—pals, if I may use the expression, what have stood together side by side through thick and through thin—pals what have shared and shared alike——” He broke off. He was not a man of acute sensibility, but he could see that the phrase, in the circumstances, was an unhappy one. “What I say is, Sam, when it’s like that—well, there’s nothing like letting bygones be bygones and, so to speak, burying the dead past. As a man of the world, you bein’ one and me bein’ another——”