ce; but since
his downfall, he had led the chorus of laughter that his nose excited,
with a degraded pride in his physical defect.

It was Dicky Freeman's turn to shout, and he began another story as Dad
sucked the dregs of beer off his moustache. Dad recognized the opening
sentence. It was one of the interminable stories out of the Decameron
of the bar-room, realistic and obscene, that circulate among drinkers.
Dad knew it by heart. He looked at his glass, and remembered that it
was his fourth drink. Instantly he thought of the Duchess. With his
usual formula "'Scuse me; I'm a married man, y'know," he hurried out of
the bar in search of his little present.

It was nine o'clock, and the Duchess would be waiting for him with his
tea since six. And always when he stopped at the "Angel" on his way
home, he tried to soften her icy looks with a little present.
Sometimes it was a bunch of grapes that he crushed to a pulp by rolling
on them; sometimes a dozen apples that he spilt out of the bag, and
recovered from the gutter with lurching steps. But tonight he happened
to stop in front of the fish shop, and a lobster caught his eye. The
beer had quickened the poetry in his soul, and the sight of this
fortified inhabitant of the deep pleased him like a gorgeous sunset.
He shuffled back to the Angel with the lobster under his arm, wrapped
in a piece of paper.

One more drink and he would go home. He put the lobster carefully at
his elbow and called for drinks. But Dicky was busy with a new trick
with a box of matches, and Dad, who was a recognized expert in the idle
devices of bar-room loafers--picking up glasses and bottles with a
finger and thumb, opening a footrule with successive jerks from the
wrist, drinking beer out of a spoon--forgot the lapse of time with the
new toy.

Punctually on the stroke of eleven the swinging doors of the Angel were
closed and the huge street lamps were extinguished. Dad's eye was
glassy, but he remembered the lobster.

"Whersh my lil' present?" he wailed. "Mush 'ave lil' present for the
Duchess, y'know. 'Ow could I g'ome, d'ye think?"

He made so much noise that the landlord came to see what was the
matter, and then the barman pointed to where he had left the lobster on
the counter. He tucked it under his arm and lurched into the street.
Now, Dad could run when he couldn't walk. He swayed a little, then
suddenly broke into a run whose speed kept him from falling and
preser