“Yes. I know you’ll think all the worse of me for it, after the blackguard way he’s got on to you. You see, before you came I didn’t like—that is, I couldn’t well refuse him; he’d have made it so hot for me here. I fancy he found out I had some pocket-money of my own, for he generally picked on me to come and have drinks with him, and of course I had to pay. Why, only last night—look out, here he comes!”
Sure enough he was, and in his usual amiable frame of mind.
“Oh, there you are, are you?” he said to Reginald, with a sneer. “Do you know where the lower-case ‘x’ is now, eh?”
Reginald, swelling with the indignation Gedge’s story had roused in him, turned his back and made no answer.
Nothing, as he might have known by this time, could have irritated Mr Durfy more.
“Look here, young gentleman,” said the latter, coming close up to Reginald’s side and hissing the words very disagreeably in his ear, “when I ask a question in this shop I expect to get an answer; mind that. And what’s more, I’ll have one, or you leave this place in five minutes. Come, now, give me a lower-case ‘x.’”
Reginald hesitated a moment. Suppose Mr Durfy had it in him to be as good as his word. What then about young Gedge?
He picked up an “x” sullenly, and tossed it at the overseer’s feet.
“That’s not giving it to me,” said the latter, with a sneer of triumph already on his face. “Pick it up directly, do you hear? and give it to me.”
Reginald stood and glared first at Mr Durfy, then at the type.