acquaintance. You will find it less difficult
to persuade him to make you a visit than to finish it." At which
Rainham had merely shrugged his shoulders, finding his friend,
perhaps for the first time, a little _banal_.

CHAPTER V

A day or two later, as Rainham sat in his river-bound office
struggling, by way of luncheon, with the most primitive of chops,
his eyes, wandering away from a somewhat mechanic scrutiny of the
_Shipping Gazette_, fell upon the shifting calendar on the
mantelpiece.

The dial noted Thursday; and he reminded himself that on that day
his friend, Lady Garnett, had a perennial habit of being at home to
her intimates, on the list of whom Rainham could acknowledge,
without undue vanity, his name occurred high. There was a touch of
self-reproach in his added reminder that a week had elapsed since
his return, and he had not already hastened to clasp the excellent
old lady's hand. It was an unprecedented postponement and an
infringement of a time-honoured habit; and Rainham had for his habit
all the respect of a man who is always indolent and often ill;
though it must be admitted that to his clerks, who viewed the trait
complacently, and to the importunate Bullen, who resented it, he
seemed to be only regular in his irregularity. He decided that at
least this occasion should not be allowed to slip; a free afternoon
would benefit him. He was always rather lavish of those licenses;
and it seemed to him that the tintinnabulation of teacups in Lady
Garnett's primrose and gray drawing-room would be a bearable change
from the din of a hundred hammers, which had pelted him through the
open windows all the morning. They were patching a little wooden
barque with copper, and he paused a moment in the yard, leaning on
his slim umbrella to admire the brilliant yellow of the renewed
sheets, standing out in vivid blots against the tarnished verdigris
of the old. To pass from Blackpool to the West, however, is a tardy
process; and when Rainham reached the spruce, little house in one of
the most select of the discreet and uniform streets which adjoin
Portman Square, he found the clatter of teacups for the most part
over. There were, in fact, only two persons in the long room, which,
with its open Erard, and its innumerable _bibelots_, and its plenitude
of quaint, impossible chairs, seemed quite cosily exiguous. An old
lady with a beautiful, refined face and a wealth of white hair,
which was still charming to