The one communication which Harry Ringrose had received from Gordon Lowndes was little more than a humorous acknowledgment of the sum refunded to him after the sale of the trophies. The writer warmly protested against the payment of a debt which he himself had never regarded in that light. The worst of it was that he was not in a position to refuse such payment. The prospects of the Highland Crofters' Salmon and Trout Supply Association, Limited, were if anything rosier than ever. But it was an axiom that the more gigantic the concern, the longer and more irritating the initial delay, and no news of the Company would be good news for some time to come.

"Meanwhile I am here every day of my life," concluded Lowndes, "and pretty nearly all day. Why the devil don't you look me up?"

Indeed, Harry might have done so on any or all of those dreadful days which took him a beggar to the City of London. His reason for not doing so was, however, a very simple one. He did not want Lowndes to think that he disbelieved in the H.C.S. & T.S.A., as he must if he knew that Harry was assiduously seeking work elsewhere. Harry was not altogether sure that he did utterly disbelieve in that colossal project. But it was difficult to put much confidence in it after the revelations at Richmond, and when it was obvious that the promoter's own daughter lacked confidence in his schemes. Certainly it was impossible to feel faith enough in the Highland Crofters' to leave lesser stones unturned. And yet to let Lowndes know what he was doing might be to throw away three hundred a year.

So Harry had avoided Leadenhall Street on days when the company-promoter's boisterous spirits and exuberant good-humour would have been particularly grateful to him. But this was before he became a successful literary man. He wanted Lowndes to hear of his success; he particularly wanted him to tell his daughter. He was not sure that he should avoid Leadenhall Street another time, nor did he when it came.

This was after the successful effort had realised only half-a-guinea, and when some subsequent attempt was coming back in disgrace by every post. Mrs. Ringrose had taken a leaf out of Harry's book, and committed a letter to the post without even letting him know that she had written one. An answer came by return, and this she showed to Harry in considerable trepidation. It was from the solicitor whom she had mentioned on the day after Harry's arrival. In it Mr. Wintour Phipps presented his compliments to Mrs. Ringrose, and stated that he would be pleased to see her son any afternoon between three and four o'clock.

"I thought old friends were barred?" Harry said, reproachfully. "I thought we were agreed about that, mother?"

"But this is not an old friend of yours or mine, my dear. I never knew him; I only know what your father did for him. He paid eighty pounds for his stamps, so I think he might do something for you! And so does he, you may depend, or he would not write that you are to go and see him."

"He doesn't insist upon it," said Harry, glancing again at the solicitor's reply. "He puts it pretty formally, too!"

"Have I not told you that I never met him? It was your father and his father who were such old friends."

"So he writes to you through a clerk!"

"How do you know?"

"It's the very hand they all tell me I ought to cultivate."

"I have no doubt he is a very busy man. I have often heard your father say so. Yet he can spare time to see you! You will go to him, my boy—to please your mother?"

"I will think about it, dear."

The mid-day post brought back another set of rejected verses. Harry swallowed his pride.

"It's all right, mother; I'll go and see that fellow this afternoon."

And there followed the last of the begging interviews, which in character and result had little to differentiate it from all the rest. Harry did indeed feel less compunction in bearding his father's god-son than in asking favours of complete strangers. He also fancied that he was better fitted for the law than for business, and, when he came to Bedford Row, he could picture himself going there quite happily every day. The knowledge, too, that this Wintour Phipps was under obligations to his father, sent the young fellow up a pair of dingy stairs with a confidence which had not attended him on any former errand of the kind. And yet in less than ten minutes he was coming down again, with his beating heart turned to lead, but with a livelier contempt for his own innocence than for the hardness of the world as most lately exemplified by Wintour Phipps. Nor would the last of these interviews be worth mentioning but for what followed; for it was on this occasion that Harry went on to Leadenhall Street to get what comfort he could from the one kind heart he knew of in the City of London.

But there an unexpected difficulty awaited him. He remembered the number, but he looked in vain for the name of Gordon Lowndes among the others that were painted on the passage wall as you went in. So he doubted his memory and tried other numbers; but results brought him back to the first, and he climbed upstairs in quest of the name that was not in the hall. He never found it; but as he reached the fourth landing a peal of unmistakable laughter came through a half-open door. And Harry took breath, for he had found his friend.

"Very well," he heard a thin voice saying quietly, "since you refuse me the slightest satisfaction, Mr. Lowndes, I shall at once take steps."

"Steps—steps, do you say?" roared Lowndes himself. "All right, take steps to the devil!"

And a small dark man came flying through the door, which was instantly banged behind him. Harry caught him in his arms, and then handed him his hat, which was rolling along the stone landing. The poor man thanked him in an agitated voice, and was tottering down the stairs, when he turned, and with sudden fury shook his umbrella at the shut door.

"The dirty scamp!" he cried. "The bankrupt blackguard!"

Harry never forgot the words, nor the working, whiskered face of the man who uttered them. He stood where he was until the trembling footfalls came up to him no more. Then he knocked at the door. Lowndes himself flung it open, and the frown of a bully changed like lightning to the most benevolent and genial smile.

"You!" he cried. "Come in, Ringrose—come in; I'm delighted to see you."

"Yes, it's me," said Harry, letting drop the hearty hand which he felt to be a savage fist unclenched to greet him. "Who did you think it was?"

"Why, the man you must have met upon the stairs! A little rat of a creditor I've chucked out this time, but will throw over the banisters if he dares to show his nose up here again."

Harry was forcibly reminded of the butcher at Richmond.

"So this is the other way of treating them?" said he.

"This is the other way. Ha! ha! I recollect what you mean. Well, I have some sympathy with a small tradesman whom the fortune of war has kept out of his money for weeks and months; not a particle for a little Jew who has the insolence to come up here and browbeat and threaten me in my own office for a few paltry pounds! If he had written me a civil note, reminding me of the debt, which was really so small that I'd forgotten all about it, he should have had his money in time. Now he may whistle for it till he's black in the face!"

Lowndes's indignation was so much more impressive than that of the little dark man on the stairs, that Harry's sympathies changed sides without his knowledge. He merely felt his heart warm to Lowndes as the latter took him by the arm and led him through the outer office (in which an undersized urchin was mastheaded on an abnormally high stool) into an inner one, where a red-nosed man sat at the far side of a large double desk.

"My friend Mr. Backhouse," said Lowndes, introducing the red-nosed man. "We're not partners; not even in the same line of business; but we share the office between us, and the clerks, too—don't we, Bacchus?"

The red-nosed man grinned at his blotting-pad, and Harry perceived that the "clerks" consisted of the small child in the outer office.

"I noticed your name down below in the passage," said Harry to Mr. Backhouse, "but I couldn't see yours, Mr. Lowndes. I nearly went away again."

"Ah! it's in Backhouse's name we have the office; it suits my hand to keep mine out of it. I'm playing a deep game, Ringrose—one of the deepest that ever was played in the City of London. I stand to win a million of money!"

Lowndes had assumed an air of suitable subtlety and mystery; his eyes were half-closed behind their gold-rimmed lenses, and he nodded his head slowly and impressively as he stood with his back to the fireplace. Harry noticed that he still wore the shabby frock-coat, and that his trousers were as baggy as ever at the knees. He could not help asking how the deep game was progressing.

"Slowly, Ringrose, slowly, but as surely as the stride of time itself. My noble Earl is up in the Highlands with his yacht. Insisted on looking into the thing with his own eyes. That's what's keeping us all, but I expect him back in another week, and then, Ringrose, you may throw up your hat; for I have not the slightest shadow of a doubt as to the result of the old chap's investigations."

Here the clock struck four, and the red-nosed man, who had also a stiff leg, put on his hat, and stumped out of the office.

"Now we can talk," said Lowndes, shutting the door, giving Harry a chair, and sitting down himself. "He'll be gone ten minutes. It's his whisky-time; he has a Scotch whisky every hour as regularly as the clock strikes. Wonderful man, Bacchus, for I never saw him a penn'orth the worse. Some day he'll go pop. But never mind him, Ringrose, and never mind the Company; tell us how the world's been using you, my boy; that's more to the point."

So Harry told him about the accepted verses, and Gordon Lowndes not only promised to tell his daughter, but was himself most emphatic in encouraging Harry to go on as he had begun. It might be his true vocation after all. If he wrote a book and made a hit it would be a better thing even than the Secretaryship of the H.C.S. & T.S.A. The delay there was particularly hard lines on Harry. Lowndes only hoped he was letting no chances slip meanwhile.

"It is always conceivable," said he, "that my aristocratic directors may each have a loafing younger son whom they may want to shove into the billet. You may depend upon me, Ringrose, to resist such jobbery tooth-and-nail; but, if I were you, I wouldn't refuse the substance for the shadow; you could always chuck it up, you know, and join us just the same."

"Then you won't be offended," said Harry, greatly relieved, "if I tell you that I have had one or two other irons in the fire?"

"Offended, my boy? I should think you a duffer if you had not."

In another minute Harry had made a clean breast of his other journeys to the City, and was recounting the latest of those miserable experiences when Lowndes cut him short.

"What!" cried he, "your father paid for the fellow's stamps, and he refused to pay for yours?"

"We never got so far as that," said Harry bitterly. "He wanted a premium with me, and that settled it. He said three hundred guineas was the usual thing, but in consideration of certain obligations he had once been under to my father (he wasn't such a fool as to go into particulars), he would take me for a hundred and fifty. And he made a tremendous favour of that. He expected me to go down on my knees with gratitude, I daresay, but I just told him that a hundred and fifty was as far beyond me as three hundred, and said good afternoon and came away. Mind you, I don't blame him. Why should I expect so much for so little? He's no worse than any of the rest; they're all the same, and I don't blame any of them. Who am I that I should go asking favours of any one of them? My God, I've asked my last!"

"You're your father's son, that's who you are," said Gordon Lowndes. "What your father did for this skunk of a solicitor, he should be the first man to do for you. What's his name, by the way?"

"Phipps."

"Not Wintour Phipps?"

Harry nodded; and his nod turned up every light in the other's expressive face. Gordon Lowndes seized his hat and was on his legs in an instant, as radiant and as eager as when he set out to chasten and correct Harry's tailors. Such little punitive crusades were in fact the salt and pepper of his existence.

"My boy," he cried, "I've known Wintour Phipps for years. I know enough to strike Wintour Phipps off the rolls to-morrow. I guess he'll do anything for me, will Wintour Phipps! So you sit just as tight as wax till I come back. I shan't be long." And he was gone before Harry grasped his meaning sufficiently to interfere. For the young fellow was apt to be slow-witted when taken by surprise: and though he ran headlong down the stairs a minute later, he was only in time to see Lowndes dive into a hansom on the other side of the crowded street, and be driven away.

He could do nothing now. He was annoyed with Lowndes, and yet the man meant well—by Harry, at all events Others might take him as they found him, and call him a scamp if they chose. Very possibly he was one; indeed, on his own showing, in his own stories, he was nothing else. But he had a kind heart, and Harry's needs and rebuffs inclined him to rate a sympathetic rogue far higher in the moral scale than a callous paragon. Whatever else might be said of Lowndes, there was no end to the trouble he would take for another. Even when he insisted on doing what the person most concerned would have had him leave undone (as in this instance), it was impossible not to feel grateful to him for doing anything at all. His unselfish enthusiasm in other people's causes was beyond all praise. He might not be a good man, but that was a virtue which many a good man had not.

Still Harry was annoyed. What Gordon Lowndes had gone to say to Wintour Phipps he could only conjecture; but the object was plainly intercessory, and Harry hated the thought of such intercession on his behalf. There was nothing for it, however, but to climb upstairs again (he had done so), and patiently to await the return of Lowndes. So the afternoon passed. Mr. Backhouse stumped in, took his hat off, wrote letters, reached his hat, and stumped out again. But still no Lowndes.

"Good-night," said Harry to the retreating Bacchus.

"Oh, I'm not going—I shall be back directly," replied that methodical man. "I have a little business down below." And he was back in ten minutes, sucking his moustache, and followed almost immediately by Gordon Lowndes, who stalked into the room with an air which Harry had not before seen him affect. His triumph was self-evident, but it was beautifully suppressed. He put down his hat with exasperating deliberation, and then stood beaming at Harry through his glasses.

"Well?" said Harry.

"It's all right," said Lowndes, very quietly, as of a foregone conclusion: "you may start work to-morrow, Ringrose. Our friend Phipps will be only too glad to have you. He will pay for the stamps for your articles, and, so far from charging you a premium, he will give you a small salary from the beginning. It won't be much, but then articled clerks as a rule get nothing. Our friend Phipps is going to make an exception in your case—and just you let me know when he treats you again as he did this afternoon. He never will! You'll find him tame enough now. You're to go to him again to-morrow morning; and you see if he don't receive you with open arms!"

"But why?" cried Harry. "What have you said?"

"What have I said? Well, I reminded him of a trifling incident which there was no need to remind him of at all, for the mere thought of it turned him pale the moment he saw me. So I took the liberty of showing him what might still happen if he didn't do exactly what I wanted about you. My boy, the thing was settled in two minutes. A rising young fellow like Wintour Phipps is not the man to be struck off the rolls if he knows it! But I wasn't coming away without having the whole thing down in black and white, and here it is."

From his inner pocket he took out a long blue envelope and slapped it down on the desk.

"May I see?" said Harry in a throbbing voice.

"Certainly; it's your business now, not mine."

Harry ran his eye over the brief document. Then he looked up.

"It's my business now—not yours?"

"To be sure."

"Then I'm very much obliged to you, Mr. Lowndes, but here's an end of it."

He tore the paper twice across, and carefully dropped it into the waste-paper basket. Then he looked up again. And he had never seen Lowndes really pale until that moment, nor really red until the next. Yet the storm passed over after all.

"Well—upon—my—soul!" said Gordon Lowndes, very slowly, but with more humour and less wrath in each successive word. "And you're the man who wanted a billet!"

"I want one still, but not on such terms. I'd rather starve."

"There's no accounting for taste."

"But I'm very sorry, I am indeed, that you should have troubled yourself to no purpose," continued Harry, holding out his hand with genuine emotion. "It was awfully good of you, and I shall never forget it."

"Nonsense—nonsense!" said Lowndes sharply. "Don't name it, my good fellow. We all look at these things differently—don't we, Bacchus? You wouldn't have had any scruples, would you? No more would I, my boy, I tell you frankly. But don't name it again. It was no trouble at all, and, even if it had been, there's nothing I wouldn't do for any of you, Ringrose, and now you know it. Hurt my feelings? Not a bit of it, my dear boy, I'm only frightened I hurt yours. Good night, good night, and my love to the old lady. Cut away home and tell her I've no more principles than Bacchus has brains!"

But Harry thought the matter over in the Underground; and it was many a day before he mentioned it at the flat.