“By all that’s wonderful!” cried Carlyon, still wringing his friend’s hand. “Do you know, Tom, I am actually up here in town for one purpose only—to hunt you up.”
“To hunt me up!”
“Oh, let’s get out of this crush, old man,” interrupted Carlyon.
The pair steered their way through the traffic, crossed the Circus, stopped for a moment at the beautiful Shaftesbury Fountain, then struck across to the Avenue. In the comparative lull of that walk Carlyon went on:
“Yes, I’ve run up to town this morning to find you out and ask you one question: Are you so fixed up—excuse the Americanism, old boy. I’ve a dashing little girl cousin, from the States, staying with my mother, and—well, you know, old fellow, how it is. Man’s an imitative creature, and all that, and absorbs dialect quicker than anything else under the sun. But what I was going to say was this: are you too fixed up with your present newspaper to forbid your entertaining the thought of a real plum in the journalistic market?”
Hammond’s customary alert look returned to his face. He was now “every inch a soldier,” as he cried, excitedly, “Don’t keep me in suspense, Carlyon; tell me quickly what you mean.”
“Let’s jump into a gondola, Tom. I can talk better as we ride.”
Carlyon had caught the eye of a cab-driver, and the next moment the two friends were being driven along riverwards.
“Someone, some Johnnie or other,” began Carlyon, as the two men settled themselves back in the cab, “once called the hansom cab the gondola of London’s streets——”
He caught the quick, impatient movement of Hammond’s face, and with a light laugh went on: