kenham, whom Mr. Cashmore, ushered in and announced, had
found in the act of helping himself to a cup of tea at the table
apparently just prepared--Harold Brookenham arrived at the point with
a dash so direct as to leave the visitor an option between but two
suppositions: that of a desperate plunge, to have his shame soon over,
or that of the acquired habit of such appeals, which had taught him the
easiest way. There was no great sharpness in the face of Mr. Cashmore,
who was somehow massive without majesty; yet he mightn't have been proof
against the suspicion that his young friend's embarrassment was an
easy precaution, a conscious corrective to the danger of audacity. It
wouldn't have been impossible to divine that if Harold shut his eyes and
jumped it was mainly for the appearance of doing so. Experience was to
be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a
light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask
for it in the same way. Mr. Cashmore had in fact looked surprised, yet
not on the whole so surprised as the young man seemed to have expected
of him. There was almost a quiet grace in the combination of promptitude
and diffidence with which Harold took over the responsibility of all
proprietorship of the crisp morsel of paper that he slipped with slow
firmness into the pocket of his waistcoat, rubbing it gently in its
passage against the delicately buff-coloured duck of which that garment
was composed. "So quite too awfully kind of you that I really don't know
what to say"--there was a marked recall, in the manner of this speech,
of the sweetness of his mother's droop and the tenderness of her wail.
It was as if he had been moved for the moment to moralise, but the
eyes he raised to his benefactor had the oddest effect of marking that
personage himself as a theme for the moralist.

Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-haired if he had not been
very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip; he was large
and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that
were not in the line of his type. "You may say anything you like if you
don't say you'll repay it. That's always nonsense--I hate it."

Harold remained sad, but showed himself really superior. "Then I won't
say it." Pensively, a minute, he appeared to figure the words, in their
absurdity, on the lips of some young man not, like himself, tactful. "I
know just what you mean."

"But