For the moment, at least, Amelius brightened at the sight of his fellow-traveller. “I am really glad to see you,” he said. “It’s lonely in these new quarters, before one gets used to them.”
Rufus relieved himself of his hat and great coat, and silently looked about the room. “I’m big in the bones,” he remarked, surveying the rickety lodging-house furniture with some suspicion; “and I’m a trifle heavier than I look. I shan’t break one of these chairs if I sit down on it, shall I?” Passing round the table (littered with books and letters) in search of the nearest chair, he accidentally brushed against a sheet of paper with writing on it. “Memorandum of friends in London, to be informed of my change of address,” he read, looking at the paper, as he picked it up, with the friendly freedom that characterized him. “You have made pretty good use of your time, my son, since I took my leave of you in Queenstown harbour. I call this a reasonable long list of acquaintances made by a young stranger in London.”
“I met with an old friend of my family at the hotel,” Amelius explained. “He was a great loss to my poor father, when he got an appointment in India; and, now he has returned, he has been equally kind to me. I am indebted to his introduction for most of the names on that list.”
“Yes?” said Rufus, in the interrogative tone of a man who was waiting to hear more. “I’m listening, though I may not look like it. Git along.”
Amelius looked at his visitor, wondering in what precise direction he was to “git along.”
“I’m no friend to partial information,” Rufus proceeded; “I like to round it off complete, as it were, in my own mind. There are names on this list that you haven’t accounted for yet. Who provided you, sir, with the balance of your new friends?”
Amelius answered, not very willingly, “I met them at Mr. Farnaby’s house.”
Rufus looked up from the list with the air of a man surprised by disagreeable information, and unwilling to receive it too readily. “How?” he exclaimed, using the old English equivalent (often heard in America) for the modern “What?”
“I met them at Mr. Farnaby’s,” Amelius repeated.
“Did you happen to receive a letter of my writing, dated Dublin?” Rufus asked.