Three weeks passed, and then one afternoon a cab rolled slowly up to the door of Number 6, Dull Street. Horace was away at the office, and Mrs Cruden herself was out taking a walk.
So the two young men who alighted from the cab found themselves monarchs of all they surveyed, and proceeded upstairs to the parlour with no one to ask what their business was.
“Now, old man,” said the sturdier of the two, “I won’t stay. I’ve brought you safe home, and you needn’t pretend you’ll be sorry to see my back.”
“I won’t pretend,” said the other, with a smile on his pale face, “but if you’re not back very soon, in an hour or two, I shall be very very sorry.”
“Never fear, I’ll be back.”
And he went.
The pale youth sat down, and looked with a strange mixture of sadness and eagerness round the little room. He had seen it before, and yet he seemed hardly to recognise it. He got up and glanced at a few envelopes lying on the mantel-piece. He took into his hands a piece of knitting that lay on one of the chairs and examined it. He turned over the leaves of a stray book, and read the name on the title-page. It all seemed so strange—yet so familiar. Then he crept silently to the half-open door of a little bedroom and peeped in, and his heart beat strangely as he recognised a photograph on the dressing-table, and by its side a letter written in his own handwriting. From this room he turned to another still smaller and more roughly furnished. A walking-stick stood in the corner that he knew well, and there was a cap on the peg behind the door, the sight of which sent a thrill through him.
Yet he felt he dared touch nothing—that he scarcely dare let his foot be heard as he paced across the room, or venture even to stir the little fire that was dying out in the grate.
The slight flush which the excitement of his first arrival had called up faded from his cheeks as the minutes wore on.
Presently his ears caught a light footfall on the pavement outside, and his heart almost stood still as it halted and the bell rang below.