after dinner and about whom later on upstairs he had sounded his
hostess. It was at present a clear question of how this amiable, this
apparently unassertive person should get home--of the possibility of
the other cab for which even now one of the footmen, with a whistle to
his lips, craned out his head and listened through the storm. Mr.
Longdon wondered to Vanderbank if their course might by any chance be
the same; which led our young friend immediately to express a readiness
to see him safely in any direction that should accommodate him. As the
footman's whistle spent itself in vain they got together into the four-
wheeler, where at the end of a few moments more Vanderbank became
conscious of having proposed his own rooms as a wind-up to their drive.
Wouldn't that be a better finish of the evening than just separating in
the wet? He liked his new acquaintance, who struck him as in a manner
clinging to him, who was staying at an hotel presumably at that hour
dismal, and who, confessing with easy humility to a connexion positively
timid with a club at which one couldn't have a visitor, accepted his
invitation under pressure. Vanderbank, when they arrived, was amused at
the air of added extravagance with which he said he would keep the cab:
he so clearly enjoyed to that extent the sense of making a night of it.
"You young men, I believe, keep them for hours, eh? At least they did in
my time," he laughed--"the wild ones! But I think of them as all wild
then. I dare say that when one settles in town one learns how to manage;
only I'm afraid, you know, that I've got completely out of it. I do feel
really quite mouldy. It's a matter of thirty years--!"

"Since you've been in London?"

"For more than a few days at a time, upon my honour. You won't
understand that--any more, I dare say, than I myself quite understand
how at the end of all I've accepted this queer view of the doom of