“Enlist?” he repeated. “As a Tommy?”
“Even as a Tommy,” said Phineas. He glanced at the ormolu clock. “It is past one. The respectable widow woman near the Elephant and Castle who has let me a bedroom will be worn by anxiety as to my non-return. Marmaduke, my dear, dear laddie, I must leave you. If you will be lunching here twelve hours hence, nothing will give me greater pleasure than to join you. Laddie, do you think you could manage a fried sole and a sweetbread?”
“Enlist?” said Doggie, following him out to the front door in a dream.
He opened the door. Phineas shook hands.
“Fried sole and a sweetbread at one-thirty?”
“Of course, with pleasure,” said Doggie.
Phineas fumbled in his pockets.
“It’s a long cry at this time of night from Bloomsbury to the Elephant and Castle. You haven’t the price of a taxi fare about you, laddie—two or three pounds——?”
Doggie drew from his patent note-case a sheaf of one-pound and ten-shilling treasury notes and handed them over to McPhail’s vulture clutch.
“Good night, laddie!”