"Do not fear. I shall be there punctually at twelve. I never go into public houses. I can't afford it. They are places for only talking and drinking and I can't afford either. Are you going?"
"Yes. I must run away now. The National Gallery folk are in a fog about a Zuccaro. They are not certain whether it is genuine or not. There is a break in the pedigree and they will do nothing until I have seen the picture and pronounced upon it. Good-bye. Twelve sharp."
"Good-bye. I'll not keep you waiting for me to-night."
Oscar Leigh came quickly out into Tunbridge Street and thence into London Road, and got on the top of an omnibus going north. He changed to the top of one going west when he reached Ludgate Circus.
If you have sharp eyes, and want to see with them that you are not followed, the top of an omnibus is an excellent way of getting about through London.
Leigh alighted from the second omnibus at Charing Cross, and walked from that straight to the Hanover in Chetwynd Street. The nation was not that day made richer by his opinion of the genuineness of the alleged Zuccaro, nor had he up to this moment conceived the advisability of inventing the mummified Egyptian prince, much less of buying his highness, with a view to painting the dial of his clock with the asphalatum from the coffin.
He had spent the time between his arrival at Victoria and his brandy and soda with Williams at the Hanover in going to and coming back from Tunbridge Street, and in his visit to John Timmons, marine-store dealer.
CHAPTER XI.
[STRANGER THAN MIRACLE GOLD.]
Grimsby Street, where Mrs. Grace, Edith's grandmother, had lodgings, to which Edith Grace had been driven that morning from Victoria, is one of the humble, dull, dingy, thoroughfares formed of small private houses in Chelsea. The ground here is very low and very flat. The houses have all half-sunken basements, bow windows on the first floor and two floors above. They are all painted of the same light, washed-out drab. They all have light drab Venetian blinds. All have tiny areas paved with light drab flags; all three steps rising six or eight inches each from the front gate to the front door. All have six steps descending from the flagged passage to the dark drab, blistered low house-door under the steps. The aspect of dull, respectable mediocrity of the whole monotonous street is heart-breaking. The sun, even of this cloudless June day, did not brighten it. The sun cannot make washed-out drab look pleasant. From end to end is not a tree or shrub or creeper, not even a single red brick to break the depressing uniformity; the chimney-pots are painted drab too. The area-railings are all black. All the doors are the colour of unpolished oak. The knockers flat and shapeless and bulged with blistered paint.