Jimmy coloured. "How do you know I've never done that yet?"
The other man shook his head. "You're too sweetly young in many of your ways and ideas. Oh, I daresay there's some prim maiden belonging to your sister's circle, with an aldermanic papa in the City—but you, yourself, would never really be in love with her. I know you too well; and if you did marry her, you would never write a book, until you had run away from her, as you would certainly do. Well," he got up abruptly, as if to avoid giving any reasons for his ideas, "I'm going over to the Record office now, and if you come, I'll introduce you to the cashier and you can get your cheque."
Jimmy did not waste any time after he left the Record office. The cashier himself changed the cheque for him, the banks being shut. Jimmy hesitated a moment as to whether he should take a hansom, then remembered the lean days of the past, and jumped on an omnibus. Lalage could make a shilling go a surprisingly long way.
He found the girl sitting in the dark, in front of an almost dead fire, and his conscience smote him on account of the time he had spent in the warm, comfortable club smoking-room.
"We're in luck, sweetheart," he said, putting his hands on her shoulders, and kissing her. "I've got the six guineas out of the Record."
She reached up and pulled his face down to hers again, in one of her rare bursts of outward affection. "Oh, I'm so glad. I was reckoning up, and I found you must have gone out without any money, even for tobacco or a drink, and I was picturing you trudging back in this cold drizzle. You are a naughty boy to do those things."
"And how about you, if I spent all the money? Wouldn't you think to yourself that I was a selfish beast?"
Lalage shook her head. "You could never be selfish; it's not your nature. You might be thoughtless, that's all. Promise me you won't go out like that again. I shall worry ever so much if you don't. I know, only too well, what it means to trudge about in the London mud without a penny for even a glass of hot milk. Oh, the cold." She gave a little shiver. "You know that shop in Regent Street, where they have the big fires in the window, showing off some stoves. I've stood there for as long as I dare, more than once, trying to think I was feeling the heat through the glass."
"Don't, please don't," Jimmy muttered thickly. "I do hate to think of it all. And it shan't be so again, I swear it shan't. Let's forget it all to-night, and go out and have some dinner somewhere, for a change. You're all on a shiver now. I'll go out and get some brandy, whilst you put your things on. I may as well bring in a bottle."
Lalage put her hand on his arm. "Not a bottle, dear, only a quartern. That'll be quite enough. Do what Lalage tells you this time."