“And the most sense.”
“Good!” remarked the assistant from the Free Library.
“And the best temper.”
“Right-o!” said the booking clerk from Walworth Road station.
Lady Frances asked Erb to get an evening paper, and he went to the small bookstall on the platform. The train was on the point of starting, and he took up a Conservative evening paper. As he did so, he glanced at the placard that was being pinned to the stall, and observed a line “Massacre of English Commission in Morocco.” He quickly bought another journal of an earlier edition. Later, when the train had gone, he found in the “fudge” of the first journal a brief message, printed unevenly, with a similar heading:—
“The Foreign Office has received news of the massacre of the English Commission recently sent out to Morocco. No particulars are to hand, but the Commission included the Lieutenant the Hon.—”
“Her young man!” cried Erb distressedly. “Thought as much! This’ll be a fearful upset for her.”
He had some idea of going at once to Eaton Square, but this seemed of little use, and he had become so much accustomed to consulting Rosalind that he decided instead to go down to Southampton Street. Arrived there, he found commotion of such importance that this trouble concerning Lady Frances took a second place.
An ambulance stood inside the gate, near to the specimens of graveyard statuary, and on the steps of the house, a constable.
“Are you,” asks C 243, barring the way, “any relation to the deceased? By deceased,” explains the constable, giving additional information with great wariness, “he doesn’t, of course, mean deceased exactly, but nearly as good as that; he means old gentleman—white-haired old gentleman—that was knocked down by a cab in the Strand not half an hour ago, as he stooped down in the middle of the roadway to pick up a halfpenny he dropped. Happened just at the corner of Wellington Street, it did. Knew the old chap by sight. One of what C 243 ventures to call the regulars. See them every day between Bedford Street and Wellington Street. You don’t know their names, of course,” says constable argumentatively, “but, bless your soul, you know their faces so well that, when one of them drops out, it makes you feel as though you’ve lost a personal friend. Every one of them on the cadge, so C 243 understands, and apparently manage to live on by borrowing from each other. A rum life, if ever there was one; no two ways about that.”