ed by the elderly fellow guest with whom he had
talked after dinner and about whom later on upstairs he had sounded his
hostess. It was at present a clear question of how this amiable, this
apparently unassertive person should get home--of the possibility of the
other cab for which even now one of the footmen, with a whistle to his
lips, craned out his head and listened through the storm. Mr. Longdon
wondered to Vanderbank if their course might by any chance be the same;
which led our young friend immediately to express a readiness to see him
safely in any direction that should accommodate him. As the footman's
whistle spent itself in vain they got together into the four-wheeler,
where at the end of a few moments more Vanderbank became conscious of
having proposed his own rooms as a wind-up to their drive. Wouldn't that
be a better finish of the evening than just separating in the wet? He
liked his new acquaintance, who struck him as in a manner clinging to
him, who was staying at an hotel presumably at that hour dismal, and
who, confessing with easy humility to a connexion positively timid with
a club at which one couldn't have a visitor, accepted his invitation
under pressure. Vanderbank, when they arrived, was amused at the air
of added extravagance with which he said he would keep the cab: he so
clearly enjoyed to that extent the sense of making a night of it. "You
young men, I believe, keep them for hours, eh? At least they did in my
time," he laughed--"the wild ones! But I think of them as all wild then.
I dare say that when one settles in town one learns how to manage; only
I'm afraid, you know, that I've got completely out of it. I do feel
really quite mouldy. It's a matter of thirty years--!"

"Since you've been in London?"

"For more than a few days at a time, upon my honour. You won't
understand that--any more, I dare say, than I myself quite understand
how at the end of all I've accepted this queer view of the doom of
coming back. But I don't doubt I shall ask you, if you'll be so good
as to let me, for the help of a hint or two: as to how to do, don't you
know? and not to--what do you fellows call it?--BE done. Now about one
of THESE things--!"

One of these things was the lift in which, at no great pace and with
much rumbling and creaking, the porter conveyed the two gentlemen to
the alarming eminence, as Mr. Longdon measured their flight, at which
Vanderbank perched. The impression made on him by this c