"Well," he said, "that's a pretty show. Have a look at this, Wallop, I
say. Your youngest grandchild could make his sevens nearly as well as
that!"
As Mr Wallop was about eighteen years old, I ventured to regard this
language as figurative on the part of Mr Doubleday, and trusted the
sevens were not quite as bad as he made out.
"All right," said Doubleday, "you can cut home to your mother-in-law.
You'll probably hear no more about it. There's millions of other
loafers after the berth."
"When will I know?" I faltered.
"Let's see, this is the nineteenth century, ain't it? Call again about
the year two thousand. February the thirty-first's the most convenient
day for us, we're all at home then. Ta-ta."
I departed rather disconsolately, and waited half an hour outside in the
street for Smith.
"Well," said I, when presently he appeared, "how did you get on?"
"Not very grand," said he. "I had to do some accounts like you. I
heard one of the partners say yours were pretty good when the clerk
brought them in."
"Really?" cried I, with pleasure I could hardly disguise. "But, I say,
Jack, unless you get on too, it'll be an awful sell."
"We can't both get on," said Jack.
"I don't know," said I. And I related what I had overheard in the
counting-house.
Smith brightened up at this. A very little encouragement was enough to
set us building castles in the air. And we did build castles in the air
that morning as we paced the crowded city streets.
By the time these architectural exercises were over it was time for me
to go back to the station and catch my train; but not before I had tried
to extract from Jack what he had been doing with himself since he was
expelled from Stonebridge House.
As before, he was very uncommunicative. All I heard was that the reason
he didn't get my letters at Packworth was that he had told me, or
thought he had told me, to address my letters to "T," and I had always
addressed them to "J." But even had I addressed them correctly, he
would only have received the first, as a fortnight after he left
Stonebridge he went to London, where he had hitherto been working as a
grocer's shop-boy. You should have seen the look of disgust with which
he referred to this part of his life! But now, having seen Merrett,
Barnacle, and Company's advertisement, he was applying for their
situation.
But in all his story he would tell me nothing about his home, or his
relatives, so that as to knowing who my friend Smith was, or where he
came from, I went back that afternoon to Brownstroke as much in the dark
as ever. But I had found _him_!