The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion, stepped backward from the doorstep to the pavement, conveyed himself in the same crab-like fashion to the center of the quadrangle of ancient buildings constituting the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the window with the yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown wire-blinds, and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it on the door-knob. Then he rejoined the other to say, with rather a perturbed and dubious air:
"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and you—being a stranger, as I take it?—and new to the sights of London—were to indulge in a little walk along Holborn—say as far as Bloomsbury Street—and drop in at the British Museum, and have a look at the Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian Bulls,—or the—the Mummies in the Egyptian Department,—and then come back again,—you might stand a better chance of getting the bell answered." The speaker added, meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in keeping with the pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin with a cleft in it: "Unless you can suggest a better idea, you know...."
"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell is answered. But I am obliged to you all the same!" said the young man.
"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk.
The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown freckles.
"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young man.
"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have begun waiting in your cradle! But time flies and business presses, and——"
"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man, as the head-clerk inserted his latchkey into the heavy door and it swung slowly backward, revealing a bare and gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak and hung with mildewed flock-paper. "Donnerwetter! how you smell here!" he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium that served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air. "But I suppose you're used to it!"
"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London offices, I should be inclined to call us rather fresh than otherwise," said Mr. Chown, who had dropped his latchkey and was groping for it on the dirty floor by the oblong of daylight admitted by the open hall-door. "But I suppose—as some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are still away on their vacations—the place might seem—to a stranger from the country—a trifle close."
"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression of disgust was highly uncomplimentary. "Drainy, black-beetly, mousey, dusty, cellary. With a tinge of escaped gas and a something else that I——" He sniffed and said, puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's gunpowder! The place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt gunpowder.... Here! Hallo! What the devil are you trying to do? What do you mean?"