"Ha!" as though to enter a protest
against the sentiment without the trouble of a refutation. He had
utterly failed in all his efforts to draw Jekyl into a discussion of
the banker's family, or even obtain from that excessively cautious young
gentleman the slightest approach to an opinion about them; and yet it
was exactly in search of this opinion that he had come down to take his
walk that evening. It was in the hope that Jekyl might afford him some
clew to these people's thoughts, or habits, or their intentions for the
coming winter, that he had promenaded for the last hour and a half.
"If he know anything of them," thought Haggerstone, "he will be but too
proud to show it, and display the intimacy to its fullest extent!"

It was, then, to his utter discomfiture, he learned that Jekyl had
scarcely spoken to Lady Hester, and never even seen Sir Stafford or Miss
Onslow. It was, then, pure invention of the waiter to say that they were
acquainted. "Jekyl has done nothing," muttered he to himself, "and I
suppose I need not throw away a dinner upon him to tell it."

Such were his reasonings; ana long did he balance in his own mind
whether it were worth while to risk a bottle of Burgundy in such a
cause; for often does it happen that the fluid thrown down the pump is
utterly wasted, and that it is vain to moisten the sucker, if the well
beneath be exhausted.

To be, or not to be? was then the eventful point he deliberated with
himself. Haggerstone never threw away a dinner in his life. He was not
one of those vulgarly minded folk who ask you, in a parenthesis, to come
in to "manger la soupe," as they say, without more preparation than the
spreading of your napkin. No; he knew all the importance of a
dinner, and, be it acknowledged, how to give it also, and could have
distinguished perfectly between the fare to set before an "habitual
diner out," and that suitable to some newly arrived Englishman abroad:
he could have measured his guest to a truffle! It was his boast that he
never gave a pheasant when a poulet would have sufficed, nor wasted his
"Chablis" on the man who would have been contented with "Barsac."

The difficulty was not, then, how to have treated Jekyl, but whether to
treat him at all. Indeed, the little dinner itself had been all planned
and arranged that morning; and the "trout" from the "Murg," and the
grouse from Eberstein, had been "pricked off," in the bill of fare, for
"No. 24," as he was unceremoniou