“That's nice,” Thorpe commented, slowly. “I envy anybody who can get into the country these days. But how did you know I was here?” “The woman in the book-store told me--I went there the first thing. You might be sure I'd look you up. Nobody was ever a better friend than you've been to me, Thorpe. And do you know what I want you to do? I want you to come right bang out, now, and have a drink with me.”
“I was thinking of something of the sort myself,” the big man replied. “I'll get my hat, and be with you in a minute.”
In the next room he relinquished his countenance to a frown of fierce perplexity. More than a minute passed in this scowling preoccupation. Then his face lightened with the relief of an idea, and he stepped confidently back into the parlour.
“Come along,” he said, jovially. “We'll have a drink downstairs, and then we'll drive up to Hanover Square and see if we can't find a friend of mine at his club.”
In the office below he stopped long enough to secure a considerable roll of bank-notes in exchange for a cheque. A little later, a hansom deposited the couple at the door of the Asian Club, and Thorpe, in the outer hallway of this institution, clicked his teeth in satisfaction at the news that General Kervick was on the premises.
The General, having been found by a boy and brought down, extended to his guests a hospitality which was none the less urbane for the evidences of surprise with which it was seasoned. He concealed so indifferently his inability to account for Tavender, that the anxious Thorpe grew annoyed with him, but happily Tavender's perceptions were less subtle. He gazed about him in his dim-eyed way with childlike interest, and babbled cheerfully over his liquor. He had not been inside a London club before, and his glimpse of the reading-room, where, isolated, purple-faced, retired old Empire-makers sat snorting in the silence, their gouty feet propped up on foot-rests, their white brows scowling over the pages of French novels, particularly impressed him. It was a new and halcyon vision of the way to spend one's declining years. And the big smoking-room--where the leather cushions were so low and so soft, and the connection between the bells and the waiters was so efficient--that was even better.