But in this frame of mind he went to the Home Office, and asked boldly for the great man.  It was then eleven o’clock in the morning and neither had the great man, nor even any of the deputy great men, as yet made their appearance.  Mr. Caldigate of course fell back upon his old opinion as to public functionaries, and, mentally, applied opprobrious epithets to men who, taking the public pay, could not be at their posts an hour before mid-day.  He was not aware that the great man and the first deputy great man were sitting in the House of Commons at 2 A.M. on that morning, and that the office generally was driven by the necessity of things to accommodate itself to Parliamentary exigencies.

Then he was asked his business.  How could he explain to a messenger that his son had been unjustly convicted of bigamy and was now in prison as a criminal?  So he left his card and said that he would call again at two.

At that hour precisely he appeared again and was told that the great man himself could not see him.  Then he nearly boiled over in his wrath, while the messenger, with all possible courtesy, went on to explain that one of the deputies was ready to receive him.  The deputy was the Honourable Septimus Brown, of whom it may be said that the Home Office was so proud that it considered itself to be superior to all other public offices whatever simply because it possessed Brown.  He had been there for forty years, and for many sessions past had been the salvation of Parliamentary secretaries and under-secretaries.  He was the uncle of an earl, and the brother-in-law of a duke and a marquis.  Not to know Brown was, at the West End, simply to be unknown.  Brooks’s was proud of him; and without him the ‘Travellers’’ would not have been such a Travellers’ as it is.  But Mr. Caldigate, when he was told that Mr. Brown would see him, almost left the lobby in instant disgust.  When he asked who was Mr. Brown, there came a muttered reply in which ‘permanent’ was the only word audible to him.  He felt that were he to go away in dudgeon simply because Brown was the name of the man whom he was called upon to see, he would put himself in the wrong.  He would by so doing close his own mouth against complaint, which, to Mr. Caldigate, would indeed have been a cutting of his own nose off his own face.  With a scowl, therefore he consented to be taken away to Mr. Brown.

He was, in the first place, somewhat scared by the room into which he was shown, which was very large and very high.  There were two clerks with Mr. Brown, who vanished, however, as soon as the squire entered the room.  It seemed that Mr. Brown was certainly of some standing in the office, or he would not have had two arm-chairs and a sofa in his room.  Mr. Caldigate, when he first consented to see Mr. Brown, had expected to be led into an uncarpeted chamber where there would have been half-a-dozen other clerks.

‘I have your card, Mr. Caldigate,’ said the official.  ’No doubt you have called in reference to your son.’