* * * * *

He looked round his room now, once or twice, wondering whether it was all worth while.  He had put his whole soul into these rooms—­there was that Jacobean press with the grotesque heads—­ah! how long he had agonized over that in the shop in the King’s Road, Chelsea, wondering whether or not it would do just what he wanted, in that space between the two doors.  There was that small statue of a Tudor lady in a square head-dress that he had bought in Oxford:  he had occupied at least a week in deciding exactly from what point she was to smile on him; there was the new curtain dividing the two rooms:  he had had half a dozen patterns, gradually eliminated down to two, lying over his sofa-back for ten days before he could make up his mind. (How lovely it looked, by the way, just now, with that patch of mellow London sunlight lying across the folds!)

But was it all worth it?...  He argued the point with himself, almost passively, stroking his brown beard meditatively; but the fact that he could argue it at all showed that the foundations of his philosophy were shaken.

Well, then ...  Frank ...  What about him?  Where was he?

(II)

About eleven o’clock a key turned in his outer door and a very smart-looking page-boy came through, after tapping, with a telegram on a salver.

Dick was writing to Hamilton’s, in Berners Street, about a question of gray mats for the spare bedroom, and he took the telegram and tore open the envelope with a preoccupied air.  Then he uttered a small exclamation.

“Any answer, sir?”

“No.  Yes....  Wait a second.”

He took a telegraph-form with almost indecent haste, addressed it to John Kirkby, Barham, Yorks, and wrote below: 

     “Certainly; will expect you dinner and sleep.—­RICHARD
     GUISELEY.”

Then, when the boy had gone, he read again the telegram he had received: 

     “Have received letter from Frank; can probably discover
     address if I come to town.  Can you put me up
     to-night?—­JACK KIRKBY, Barham.”

He pondered it a minute or so.  Then he finished his note to Hamilton’s, but it was with a distracted manner.  Then for several minutes he walked up and down his rooms with his hands in his jacket-pockets, thinking very deeply.  He was reflecting how remarkable it was that he should hear of Frank again just at this time, and was wondering what the next move of Providence would be.

The rest of Dick’s day was very characteristic of him; and considering my other personages in this story and their occupations, I take a dramatic sort of pleasure in writing it down.