'Ah there, confound it!' said Bertram Braddle when he had once more frowned, so far as he could frown, over his telegram. 'I must catch the train if I'm to have my morning clear in town. And it's a most abominable nuisance!'

'Do you mean on account of—a—her?' asked, after a minute's silent sympathy, the friend to whom—in the hall of the hotel, still bestrewn with the appurtenances of the newly disembarked—he had thus querulously addressed himself.

He looked hard for an instant at Henry Chilver, but the hardness was not all produced by Chilver's question. His annoyance at not being able to spend his night at Liverpool was visibly the greatest that such a privation can be conceived as producing, and might have seemed indeed to transcend the limits of its occasion. 'I promised her the second day out that, no matter at what hour we should get in, I would see her up to London and save her having to take a step by herself.'

'And you piled up the assurance'—Chilver somewhat irrelevantly laughed—'with each successive day!'

'Naturally—for what is there to do between New York and Queenstown but pile up? And now, with this pistol at my head'—crumpling the telegram with an angry fist, he tossed it into the wide public chimney-place—'I leave her to scramble through to-morrow as she can. She has to go on to Brighton and she doesn't know———' And Braddle's quickened sense of the perversity of things dropped to a moment's helpless communion with the aggravating face of his watch.

'She doesn't know———?' his friend conscientiously echoed.

'Oh, she doesn't know anything! Should you say it's too late to ask for a word with her?'

Chilver, with his eyes on the big hotel-clock, wondered. 'Lateish—isn't it?—when she must have been gone this quarter of an hour to her room.'

'Yes, I'm bound to say she has managed that for herself!' and Braddle stuck back his watch. 'So that, as I haven't time to write, there's nothing for me but to wire her—ever so apologetically—the first thing in the morning from town.'

'Surely—as for the steamer special there are now only about five minutes left.'

'Good then—I join you,' said Braddle, with a sigh of submission. 'But where's the brute who took my things? Yours went straight to the station?'

'No—they're still out there on the cab from which I set you down. And there's your chap with your stuff'—Chilver's eye had just caught the man—'he's ramming it into the lift. Collar him before it goes up.' Bertram Braddle, on this, sprang forward in time; then while at an office-window that opened into an inner sanctuary he explained his case to a neatly fitted priestess whose cold eyes looked straight through nonsense, putting it before her that he should after all not require the room he had telegraphed for, his companion only turned uneasily about at a distance and made no approach to the arrested four-wheeler that, at the dock, had received both the gentlemen and their effects. 'I join you—I join you,' Braddle repeated as he brought back his larger share of these.

Chilver appeared meanwhile to have found freedom of mind for a decision. 'But, my dear fellow, shall I too then go?'

Braddle stared. 'Why, I thought you so eminently had to.'

'Not if I can be of any use to you. I mean by stopping over and offering my—I admit very inferior—aid———'

'To Mrs. Damerel?' Braddle took in his friend's sudden and—as it presented itself—singularly obliging change of plan. 'Ah, you want to be of use to her?'

'Only if it will take her off your mind till you see her again. I don't mind telling you now,' Chilver courageously continued, 'that I'm not positively in such a hurry. I said I'd catch the train because I thought you wanted to be alone with her.'

The young men stood there now a trifle rigidly, but very expressively, face to face: Bertram Braddle, the younger but much the taller, smooth, handsome, and heavy, with the composition of his dress so elaborately informal, his pleasant monocular scowl so religiously fixed, his hat so despairingly tilted, and his usual air—innocent enough, however—of looking down from some height still greater—as every one knew about the rich, the bloated Braddles—than that of his fine stature; Chilver, slight and comparatively colourless, rather sharp than bright, but with—in spite of a happy brown moustache, scantily professional, but envied by the man whose large, empty, sunny face needed, as some one had said, a little planting—no particular 'looks' save those that dwelt in his intelligent eyes. 'And what then did you think I wanted to do?'

'Exactly what you say. To present yourself in a taking light—to deepen the impression you've been at so much trouble to make. But if you don't care for my stopping———!' And tossing away the end of his cigarette with a gesture of good-humoured renouncement, Chilver moved across the marble slabs to the draughty portal that kept swinging from the street.

There were porters, travellers, other impediments in his way, and this gave Braddle an appreciable time to watch his receding back before it disappeared; the prompt consequence of which was an 'I say, Chilver!' launched after him sharply enough to make him turn round before passing out. The speaker had not otherwise stirred, and the interval of space doubtless took something from the straightness of their further mute communication. This interval, the next minute, as Chilver failed to return, Braddle diminished by gaining the door in company with a porter whose arm he had seized on the way. 'Take this gentleman's things off the cab and put on mine.' Then as he turned to his friend: 'Go and tell the young woman there that you'll have the room I've given up.'

Chilver laid upon him a hand still interrogative enough not to be too grateful. 'Are you very sure it's all right?'

Braddle's face simply followed for a moment, in the outer lamplight, the progress of the operation he had decreed. 'Do you think I'm going to allow you to make out that I'm afraid?'

'Well, my dear chap, why shouldn't you be?' Henry Chilver, with this retort, did nothing; he only, with his hands in his pockets, let the porter and the cabman bestir themselves. 'I simply wanted to be civil.'

'Oh, I'll risk it!' said the younger man with a free enough laugh. 'Be awfully attentive, you know.'

'Of course it won't be anything like the same thing to her,' Chilver went on.

'Of course not, but explain. Tell her I'm wiring, writing. Do everything, in short. Good-bye.'

'Good-bye, good-bye, old man.' And Chilver went down with him to the rearranged cab. 'So many thanks.'

'Thanks?' said the other as he got in.

'I mean because I'm—hang it!—just tired enough to be glad to go to bed.'

'Oh!' came rather drily from Braddle out of the window of the cab.

'Shan't I go with you to the station?' his companion asked.

'Dear no—much obliged!'

'Well, you shall have my report!' Chilver continued.

'Ah, I shall have Mrs. Damerel's!' Braddle answered as the cab drove away.