"I should be awfully obliged to you," he says croakily; "you would be laying me under a very real obligation if you would——" He stops to cough.
"If I would what?" returns the other curtly, and looking apprehensively at a book which Brown is expanding before his eyes.
"If you would read instead of me."
"I!"
"Why, the fact is"—coughing noisily again as if to show that there is no imposition—"I suppose the fog must have got down my throat; but I find I cannot speak above a whisper. I should not be heard beyond the front row; come, old man, do a good-natured thing for once in your life."
There is a pause; Burgoyne is not very fond of being asked to do a good-natured thing. He can do a big one every now and then, but he is not particularly fond of being asked to do a small one.
"Surely there must be many people here much better suited for it than I am," he says presently, looking uncomfortably round in search of the little group of booked and musicked persons whom he had seen but now standing near him, but it had melted.
"That is just what there are not," rejoins Brown, pressing his point with the more eagerness, as he thinks he sees signs of yielding; "we are very short of hands to-night, and my wife has just heard that the girl upon whom she was counting for a couple of songs is in bed with influenza."
"Happy girl! I wish I too was in bed with influenza," says Jim sardonically, for he sees his fate about to overtake him.
And so it comes to pass that, five minutes later, as described at the opening of this chapter, he is seated on the platform with "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings" before him, rows of Provident Matrons' eyes fastened expectantly upon him, and horrid qualms of strange shyness racing over him.