Hanbury looked in, and seeing Leigh, paid the man in the jacket the money and entered the private bar. The dwarf was there alone. This apartment had few visitors until evening, and all the idle people had been drawn off in the wake of the Negro's litter. Even Williams the landlord had been induced by curiosity to make one of the crowd.
"Hah," said Leigh, when he saw Hanbury come in and shut the door. "You thought better of waiting for that cab. I wasn't very long. I am glad you came back. I hope you are again quite well? Eh?" His words and accent were polite--too polite the young man thought. There was a scornful glitter in the hunchback's eyes. A huge volume bound in red cloth lay on the polished metal counter beside him. When Hanbury saw the volume his face flushed vividly. The book was the Post Office Directory.
"I am quite well again, thank you. I came back on purpose to see you." He drew a high stool towards him and sat down, trying to cover his confusion by the act.
"Greatly honoured, I'm sure," said the other man, with all the outward seeming of sincerity, but with that nasty glitter in the bright deep-sunken eyes.
"No, no," said Hanbury, with emphatic gestures of his arms. "My going off so suddenly must have seemed strange----"
"Oh dear no! Hah! I have often heard of men going off in a dead faint in the same way. I was just trying to make up my mind which of the Hanburys in the Directory you were. Let me see," opening the huge book.
"I don't mean my--my illness. That's not what I meant when I said 'going off.' I meant that you must have been surprised at my going away before you came back with the cab. But I was anxious to get away, and quite confused at the moment, and it was not until the lady with me reminded me of your kindness that I resolved to come back. I am sure I don't know how to thank you sufficiently. Only for you I cannot think how I should have got on. The lady----"
"'Miss Ashton,' she told me her name was," said Leigh, with a peculiar smile that made the young man flush again. The implication he took of the smile being that she was able to speak when he was senseless.
"Yes," he said with constraint; he could not bring himself to utter her name in such a low place, a common pot-house!
"May I ask you if you are Mr. John Hanbury?"