ste had not deserted him in choosing the brown
suit and the gabardine.

Of his boots he was a little doubtful. Their brown was aggressive; but
that, so the gentleman in Harrod's Stores who sold them had assured him,
would pass away in time. Aggressiveness of colour is inevitable in new
brown boots.

At Rugby he lit a second cigarette and commented on the warmth of
the night to an elderly gentleman who entered the carriage from the
corridor. The elderly gentleman was uncommunicative and merely growled
in reply. Mannix offered him a match. The gentleman growled again and
lit his cigar from his own matchbox. Mannix arrived at the conclusion
that he must be, for some reason, in a bad temper. He watched him for a
while and then decided further that he was, if not an actual "bounder,"
at all events "bad form." The elderly gentleman had a red, blotched
face, a thick neck, and swollen hands, with hair on the backs of them.
He wore a shabby coat, creased under the arms, and trousers which bagged
badly at the knees. Mannix, had the elderly gentleman happened to be a
small boy in Edmonstone House, would have felt it his duty to impart to
him something of the indefinable quality of tone.

Shortly before reaching Crewe, the old gentleman having smoked
three cigars with fierce vigour, left the carriage. Mannix, feeling
disinclined for more tobacco, went to sleep. At Holyhead he was wakened
from a deep and dreamless slumber. A porter took his kit-bag and wanted
to relieve him also of the gun-case, the fishing-rod, and the gabardine.
But Mannix, even in his condition of half awakened giddiness clung
to these. He followed the porter across a stretch of wooden pier, got
involved in a crowd of other passengers at the steamer's gangway, and
was hustled by the elderly gentleman who had smoked the three cigars.
He still seemed to be in a bad temper. After hustling Mannix, he swore,
pushed a porter aside and forced his way across the gangway. Mannix, now
almost completely awake, resented this behaviour very much and decided
that the elderly gentleman was not in any real sense of the word a
gentleman, but simply a cad.

Indignation, though a passion of a harassing nature, does not actually
prevent sleep in a man of seventeen years of age who is in good general
health. Mannix coiled himself up on one of the sofas which line the
corridors of the Irish mail steamers. He was dimly conscious of seeing
the old gentleman who had hustled him trip