"Yes, George suits me better than the stockbroker. I never could get on very well with your ultra-respectable men. I'm as ready to 'undertake a dirty job' as any man; but I don't like a fellow to offer me dirty work and pretend it's clean."
"Ah, he's been getting you to do a little of the bear business, I suppose," said the Captain. "I don't see that your conscience need trouble you about that. Amongst a commercial people money must change hands. I can't see that it much matters how the change takes place."
"No, to be sure; that's a comfortable way of putting it, at any rate. However, I'm tired of going about in the ursine guise, and I'm going to cut it. I've an old aunt settled at Dorking who has got a little bit of money to leave, and I think I'll go and look her up."
"An aunt at Dorking! I never heard of her before."
"O yes you have," answered Mr. Hawkehurst, with supreme nonchalance; "you've heard of her often enough, only you've a happy knack of not listening to other people's affairs. But you must have been wrapped up in yourself with a vengeance if you don't remember to have heard me speak of my aunt--Sarah."
"Well, well, it may be so," murmured the Captain, almost apologetically. "Your aunt Sarah? Ah, to be sure; I have some recollection: is she your father's sister?"
"No; she's the sister of my maternal grandmother--a great-aunt, you know. She has a comfortable little place down at Dorking, and I can get free quarters there whenever I like; so as you don't particularly want me just now, I think I'll run down to her for a week or two."
The Captain had no objection to offer to this very natural desire on the part of his adopted son; nor did he concern himself as to the young man's motive for leaving London.
Mr. Hawkehurst had no excuse for going to the Lawn before his departure; but the stately avenues between Bayswater and Kensington are free to any man; and, having nothing better to do, Valentine put a shabby little volume of Balzac in his pocket, and spent his last morning in town under the shadow of the mighty elms, reading one of the great Honoré's gloomiest romances, while the autumn leaves drifted round him, dancing fairy measures on the grass, and scraping and scuffling on the gravel, and while children with hoops and children with balls scampered and screamed in the avenue by which he sat. He was not particularly absorbed by his book. He had taken it haphazard from the tattered collection of cheap editions which he carried about with him in his wanderings, ignominiously stuffed into the bottom of a portmanteau, amongst boots and clothes-brushes and disabled razors.