grating, Reuben Hornby, standing in a similar attitude to my own.  He was dressed in his usual clothes and with his customary neatness, but his face was unshaven and he wore, suspended from a button-hole, a circular label bearing the characters “B.31”; and these two changes in his exterior carried with them a suggestiveness as subtle as it was unpleasant, making me more than ever regretful that Miss Gibson had insisted on coming.

“It is exceedingly good of you, Dr. Jervis, to come and see me,” he said heartily, making himself heard quite easily, to my surprise, above the hubbub of the adjoining boxes; “but I didn’t expect you here.  I was told I could see my legal advisers in the solicitor’s box.”

“So you could,” I answered.  “But I came here by choice because I have brought Miss Gibson with me.”  “I am sorry for that,” he rejoined, with evident disapproval; “she oughtn’t to have come among these riff-raff.”

“I told her so, and that you wouldn’t like it, but she insisted.”

“I know,” said Reuben.  “That’s the worst of women—­they will make a beastly fuss and sacrifice themselves when nobody wants them to.  But I mustn’t be ungrateful; she means it kindly, and she’s a deuced good sort, is Juliet.”

“She is indeed,” I exclaimed, not a little disgusted at his cool, unappreciative tone; “a most noble-hearted girl, and her devotion to you is positively heroic.”

The faintest suspicion of a smile appeared on the face seen through the double grating; on which I felt that I could have pulled his nose with pleasure—­only that a pair of tongs of special construction would have been required for the purpose.

“Yes,” he answered calmly, “we have always been very good friends.”

A rejoinder of the most extreme acidity was on my lips.  Damn the fellow!  What did he mean by speaking in that supercilious tone of the loveliest and sweetest woman in the world?  But, after all, one cannot trample on a poor devil locked up in a jail on a false charge, no matter how great may be the provocation.  I drew a deep breath, and, having recovered myself, outwardly at least, said—­

“I hope you don’t find the conditions here too intolerable?” “Oh, no,” he answered.  “It’s beastly unpleasant, of course, but it might easily be worse.  I don’t mind if it’s only for a week or two; and I am really encouraged by what Dr. Thorndyke said.  I hope he wasn’t being merely soothing.”

“You may take it that he was not.  What he said, I am sure he meant.  Of course, you know I am not in his confidence—­nobody is—­but I gather that he is satisfied with the defence he is preparing.”

“If he is satisfied, I am,” said Reuben, “and, in any case, I shall owe him an immense debt of gratitude for having stood by me and believed in me when all the world—­except my aunt and Juliet—­had condemned me.”

He then went on to give me a few particulars of his prison life, and when he had chatted for a quarter of an hour or so, I took my leave to make way for Miss Gibson.