"What are you doing out here at this time of night, you young monkey? Don't you know it's almost one o'clock?" said Cleek, as he went forward and joined the boy.
"Don't I know it, says you? Don't I _just_!" he gave back. "There aren't a minute since the night come on that I haven't counted, sir--not a bloomin' one; and if you hadn't turned up just as you did----Well, let that pass, as the Suffragette said when she heaved 'arf a brick through the shop window. Gawd's truth, guv'ner, do you realise that you've been gone since yesterday afternoon and I haven't heard a word from you in all that time?"
"Well, what of that? It's not the first time by dozens that I've done the same thing. Why should it worry you at this late day? Look here, my young man, you're not developing 'nerves' are you? Because, if you are----Turn round and let's have a look at you! Why, you are as pale as a ghost, you young beggar, and shaking like a leaf. Anything wrong with you, old chap?"
"Not as I knows of," returned Dollops, making a brave attempt to smile and be his old happy-go-lucky, whimsical self, albeit he wasn't carrying it off quite successfully, for there was a droop to his smile and a sort of whimper underlying his voice, and Cleek's keen eyes saw that his hand groped about blindly in its effort to find the fastenings of the garden door.
"Leastwise, nothing as matters now that you are here, sir. And I _am_ glad yer back, guv'ner--Lawd, yuss! 'Nothin' like company to buck you up,' as the bull said when he tossed the tinker; so of course----"
"Here! You let those fastenings alone. I'll attend to them!" rapped in Cleek's voice with a curious note of alarm in it, as he moved briskly forward and barred and locked the wall door. "If I didn't know that eating, not drinking, was your particular failing----"
Here he stopped, his half-uttered comment cut into by a bleating cry, and he screwed round to face a startling situation. For there was Dollops, leaning heavily against a flowering almond tree, his face like a dead face for colour, and his fingers clawing frantically at the lower part of his waistcoat, doubling and twisting in the throes of an internal convulsion.
The gravelled pathway gave forth two sharp scrunches, and Cleek was just in time to catch him as he lurched forward and sprawled heavily against him. The man's arms closed instinctively about the twisting, sweat-drenched, helpless shape, and with great haste and infinite tenderness gathered it up and carried it into the house; but he had scarcely more than laid the boy upon a sofa and lit the lamp of the small apartment which served them as a general living-room, when all the agony of uncertainty which beset his mind regarding the genesis of this terrifying attack vanished in a sudden rush of enlightenment.