“I assure you you are wrong.  I can’t help trying to realize your sensations, but that doesn’t prevent me from being very sorry for you, and I’m sure I shall be very pleased to help you.  Do you want any money?  Don’t be shy about saying yes.  I haven’t forgotten how you helped me.”

“I really don’t like to ask you, you’ve been very good as it is.  However, if you could spare me a tenner?”

“Of course I can.  Let’s send these jarvies away, and come into my hotel, and I’ll write you a cheque.”

The sum Frank asked for revealed to Mike exactly the depth to which he had sunk since they had last met.  Small as it was, however, it seemed to have had considerable effect in reviving Frank’s spirits, and he proceeded quite cheerfully into the tale of his misfortune.  Now it seemed to strike him too in quite a literary light, and he made philosophic comments on its various aspects, as he might on the hero of a book which he was engaged on or contemplated writing.

“No,” he said, “you were quite wrong in supposing that I waited to look back on the old places.  I got out of the park through a wood so as to avoid the gate-keeper.  In moments of great despair we don’t lapse into pensive contemplation.” ...  He stopped to pull at the cigar Mike had given him, and when he had got it well alight, he said, “It was really most dramatic, it would make a splendid scene in a play; you might make him murder the baby.”

Half an hour after Mike bade his friend good-bye, glad to be rid of him.

“He’s going back to that beastly wife who lives in some dirty lodging.  How lucky I was, after all, not to marry.”

Then, remembering the newspaper, and the use it might be to him when in Parliament, he rushed after Frank.  When the Pilgrim was mentioned Frank’s face changed expression, and he seemed stirred with deeper grief than when he related the story of his disinheritance.  He had no further connection with the paper.  Thigh had worked him out of it.

“I never really despaired,” he said, “until I lost my paper.  Thigh has asked me to send him paragraphs, but of course I’m not going to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Well, hang it, after being the editor of a paper, you aren’t going to send in paragraphs on approval.  It isn’t good enough.  When I go back to London I shall try to get a sub-editorship.”

Mike pressed another tenner upon him, and returning to the smoking-room, and throwing himself into an arm-chair, he lapsed into dreams of the bands and the banners that awaited him.  When animal spirits were ebullient in him, he regarded his election in the light of a vulgar practical joke; when the philosophic mood was upon him he turned from all thought of it as from the smell of a dirty kitchen coming through a grating.

CHAPTER XI