‘I beg your pardon,’ he said gaspingly; ‘I stumbled.’
‘You did,’ responded the stranger, gasping also. ‘Rather heavily. It was lucky you had something soft to fall on.’
Philip began to make apologies. The stranger, breathless still, but jovially polite, begged him not to mention it. He was a tallish young man, broad set, and a little too fleshy for his years. He had a cleanshaven face, healthily pallid, the whitest of teeth, and a most frank, engaging, and contagious smile.
‘Pray don’t say anything more about it,’ he said in answer to Philip’s reiterated apologies. ‘You are not hurt, I hope?’
‘Not at all. It was sharp for a minute; but I am all right now. The stairs are very inconvenient, especially to strangers.’
‘I haven’t even that excuse for my clumsiness, said Philip; ‘for I am living here.’
‘Indeed; then we are neighbours, and should know each other. Rather an informal kind of introduction, eh?’ The stranger said this with a mellow laugh and a flash of his white teeth. He opened his overcoat as he spoke, and produced a card-case, Philip catching the gleam of a gold-studded shirt-front as he did so. ‘That’s my name, John Barter; and these are my offices.’ The outer oak, cracked and blistered to the likeness of an ancient tar-barrel, bore an inscription, dim with long years--‘Fellowship, Freemantle, and Barter’--and the names were repeated on the doorpost at the entrance.
‘I have no card,’ said Philip, accepting the stranger’s. ‘My name is Bommaney--Philip Bom-maney;’ Mr. Barter’s smiling face was unchanged, though he gave a slight but perceptible start at the name, and repeated it.
‘Do you know it?’ asked Philip. To the ears of his companion there was something of a challenge in the tone. ‘It is not a common name.’
‘No. Not a common name. I think I have heard it somewhere.’
They were under the archway by this time, in the brief shelter of which the sanguine-faced, red-waist-coated lodge-keeper was taking his nightly constitutional. They answered the touch of the hat with which he saluted them.
‘Mine is east,’ said Barter, ‘so we part here. We are bound to meet again before long. Good-night.’
‘Good-night, and many thanks for taking my clumsiness in such good part.’
Barter’s ready smile beamed out again. They shook hands before parting like old acquaintances, and Philip walked on, through the incessant noise of Holborn into quieter Bloomsbury Street, along the eastern side of Bedford Square, where the bare trees were shivering in a bath of fog, and into Gower Street. Half way down that hideous thoroughfare he came upon a house, one of the few which still retain the old lamp-iron and extinguisher before their doors, and knocking, was admitted by a trim maid, with the smiling alacrity due to a frequent and favoured visitor, and by her conducted to the drawing-room, where sat a young lady engaged in a transparent pretence of being absorbed in a novel. The pretence vanished as the door closed behind the handmaiden, and the young lady jumped up and ran forward to meet him, with such a glad welcome in her face as answered the appeal in his own. It does not need that we should look at her with Philip’s eyes to pronounce her charmingly pretty, or to admire the face, at once shy and frank, with which she nestled beside him.