To which the young man thus addressed could only reiterate that he deeply regretted the absence of a letter of introduction, and that his credentials could only be displayed to His Excellency himself.
"It is likely!" The porter's forehead corrugated with suspicion: "Thus is he approached by lunatics and dangerous persons, armed with crazy petitions or lethal weap——"
"Bosh!"
The English word made the porter leap in his square-toed, steel-buckled half-shoes. Recklessly P. C. Breagh went on:
"I'm neither a lunatic nor an assassin... It's just a case of Rettung aus Gefahr. Two lives saved in the year 1842, and another less than an hour ago.... Send that message to His Excellency, and he'll see me, I believe!"
"He believes!" ... snorted the porter indignantly.
A little, stooping, shabbily dressed old man in a chocolate-colored frock-coat with gilt buttons came shuffling across the vestibule carrying a handful of papers, telegrams they appeared to be. He had paused to listen to the latter part of the colloquy, holding his head on one side, as though the better to focus his sharp gray glance on the dusty, obtrusive young Englishman crowned with a sun-burnt Oxford straw hat, attired in a well-worn brown Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and heather-mixture woolen stockings, and shod with stout, black, leather-laced, hob-nailed boots.
"He believes!" exclaimed the porter as though referring to the chocolate-coated old gentleman. "Will not the highly well-born Herr Legation-Councillor order that I summon Grams and Engelberg, and have this presumptuous person thrown into the street?"
"Softly, softly, my good Niederstedt!" advised the little chocolate-coated old gentleman. He added, shuffling forward in his immense black cloth boots over the slippery marble pavement of the vestibule: "It has occurred to me that an utterance of this young man's referred to an article that has been lost by His Excellency." He added, fixing his sharp, gray, jackdaw's eyes on the face of the young man: "Not valuable, but worth recovering—purely as a memento of the past!..."
Said Carolan bluntly: