that he'd fired off a letter to the _Times_ directed
against our dear Professor; and, having fired it, had learnt from
somebody that the Professor was a close friend of ours. He had come
around to make the peace with you, if he could--he's a funny little
snob. But you had flown."

"I had gone off," said I, "to catch Jack Foe and warn him that the
letter was dangerous."

"Think so? Well, you'd left the _Times_ lying on the floor, and
he picked it up and read his composition to me while I dallied with
the bacon. It seemed to me pretty fair tosh, and I told him so.
I promised that if his second thoughts about it coincided with my
first ones, I would pass them on together to you when I saw you next,
and added that I had trouble to adapt my hours to political
candidates, they were such early risers. That, you might say, verged
on a hint: but he didn't take it. He hung about, standing on one leg
and then on the other, protesting that he would put things right.
I hate people who stand on one leg when you're breakfasting, don't
you? . . . So I gave him a cigar, and he smoked it whilst I went on
eating. He said it was a first-class cigar and asked me where I
dealt. I said truthfully that it was one of yours, and falsely that
you bought them in Leadenhall Market off a man called Huggins.
I gave him the address, which he took down with a gold pencil in his
pocket-book. . . . I said they were probably smuggled, and (as I
expected) he winked at me and said he rather gathered so from the
address. He also said that he knew a good thing wherever he saw it,
that you were his _bo ideal_ of a British baronet, and that we had
very cosy quarters. This led him on to discourse of his wife, and
how lonely he felt since losing her--she had been a martyr to
sciatica. But there was much to be said for a bachelor existence,
after all. It was so free. His wife had never, in the early days,
whole-heartedly taken to his men friends: for which he couldn't
altogether blame her--they weren't many of 'em drawing-room company.
A good few of them, too, had gone down in the world while he had been
going up. He instanced some of these, but I didn't recollect having
met any of 'em. There were others he'd lost sight of. He named
these too--good old Bill This and Charley That and a Frank Somebody
who sang a wonderful tenor in his day and would bring tears to your
eyes the way he gave you _Annie Laurie_ when half drunk: but again I
couldn't rec