"With pleasure."
"No, now I think of it—the man knows my ways: I must keep him. But my old wine-merchant—civil man, never dunned—is a bankrupt. I am under great obligations to him, and he has a very pretty daughter. Do you think you could thrust him into some small place in the colonies, or make him a king's messenger, or something of the sort?"
"If you very much wish it, no doubt I can."
"My dear Audley, I am but feeling my way: the fact is, I want something for myself."
"Ah, that indeed gives me pleasure!" cried Egerton, with animation.
"The mission to Florence will soon be vacant—I know it privately. The place would quite suit me. Pleasant city; the best figs in Italy—very little to do. You could sound Lord —— on the subject."
"I will answer beforehand. Lord —— would be enchanted to secure to the public service a man so accomplished as yourself, and the son of a peer like Lord Lansmere."
Harley L'Estrange sprang to his feet, and flung his cigar in the face of a stately policeman, who was looking up at the balcony.
"Infamous and bloodless official!" cried Harley L'Estrange; "so you could provide for a pimpled-nosed lackey—for a wine-merchant who has been poisoning the king's subjects with white lead or sloe-juice—for an idle sybarite, who would complain of a crumpled rose-leaf; and nothing in all the vast patronage of England for a broken down soldier, whose dauntless breast was her rampart."
"Harley," said the Member of Parliament, with his calm, sensible smile, "this would be very good clap-trap at a small theatre; but there is nothing in which Parliament demands such rigid economy as the military branch of the public service; and no man for whom it is so hard to effect what we must plainly call a job, as a subaltern officer, who has done nothing more than his duty—and all military men do that. Still, as you take it so earnestly, I will use what interest I can at the War Office, and get him, perhaps, the mastership of a barrack."