my married and left me, and soon after I moved from our old
quarters in the Temple to my present rooms in Jermyn Street.

Four years passed: and then, one fine morning, my door opened, and
John Foe called me by name.

"Hallo, Roddy! How goes it?"

I jumped up, in a pretty bad scare. It was the voice that did it:
for, my door making an angle with the window, and the day being
sunny, he stood there against a strong light--sort of silhouette
effect, as you might put it. And there was a something about him,
thus gloomed--but we'll talk of that by and by. The voice was Jack
Foe's, and none other.

"It's all right," he went on easily. "Pull yourself together.
. . . It _is_ the Ancient Mariner come home, but you needn't
imitate the Pilot and fall down in a fit. . . . Where's the Pilot's
Boy, by the way--young Jimmy Collingwood? You still keep Jephson, I
see. . . . I happened on Jephson at your street-door, just returned
from posting a letter. Jephson performed the holy Hermit very
creditably: he raised his eyes and almost sat down on the doorstep
and prayed where he did sit. 'Doctor Foe!' said Jephson.
'Good Lord, send may I never--!'--which amounts to a prayer,
eh? . . . He let me in with his latchkey, and I told him I'd run up
unannounced. . . . Well?"

He came forward. In the old days Jack and I never shook hands; nor
did we now. He set down hat, gloves, and umbrella carelessly on my
knee-hole table and dropped into a chair with a long-drawn sigh.
"Reminds one--eh?--of the famous stage-direction in _The Rovers--
Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the
Thirty Years' War_. . . . Well? What are you still staring at?
. . . Oh, I perceive! It's my clothes. . . . Yes; I should inform
you that they are expensive, and the nearest compromise a Valparaiso
tailor and I could reach in realising our several ideas of a Harley
Street doctor. I am going to open a practice in that neighbourhood,
and thought I would lose no time. The hat and umbrella over there
are all right, if you'll give yourself the trouble to examine them.
I bought them on the way along."

He was right, in a way, about his clothes. (I believe I have already
mentioned that Jack had always dressed himself carefully and in good
form.) His frock-coat had a fullness of skirt, and his trousers a
bluish aggressive tint, that I couldn't pass for metropolitan.
His boots were worse--of some wrong sort of patent leather. Bu