He was waiting for the question which was bound to come.

It came from Spinks, and in a form more horrible than any that he had imagined.

“I say, Rickets, wot did you want all those shirts for down in Devonshire?”

Instead of replying Rickets blew his nose, making his pocket-handkerchief conceal as much of his face as possible.  At that moment he caught Miss Bishop staring at him, and if there was one thing that Mr. Rickman disliked more than another it was being stared at.  Particularly by Miss Bishop.  Miss Bishop had red hair, a loose vivacious mouth, and her stare was grossly interrogative.

Flossie sent out a little winged look at him like a soft dark butterfly.  It skimmed and hovered about him, and flitted, too ethereal to alight.

Miss Bishop however had no scruples, and put it to him point blank.

“Devonshire?” said Miss Bishop, “what were you doing down there?” She planted her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her finger-tips; her stare thus tilted was partly covered by her eyelids.

“If you really want,” said Mr. Spinks, “to see that gentleman opposite, you’ll have to take a telescope.”  The adoring youth conceived that it had been given to him alone of the boarders to penetrate the mind of Rickman, that he was the guardian of his mood, whose mission it was to protect him from the impertinent approaches of the rest.

“A telescope?  Wot d’you mean?”

“Don’t you think he’s got a sort of a far-away look?  Especially about the mouth and nose?”

Whether it was from being stared at or for some other reason, but by this time Mr. Rickman had certainly become a little distant.  He was not getting on well with anybody or anything, not even with Mrs. Downey’s excellent dinner, nor yet with the claret, an extra ordered for his private drinking, always to Mrs. Downey’s secret trepidation.  She gave a half-timid, half-tender look at him and signalled to her ladies to withdraw.  She herself remained behind, superintending the removal of the feast; keeping a motherly eye, too, on the poor boy and his claret.  Ever since that one dreadful Sunday morning when she had found him asleep in full evening dress upon his bedroom floor, Mrs. Downey was always expecting to see him drop under the table.  He had never done it yet, but there was no knowing when he mightn’t.

Whatever the extent of Mr. Rickman’s alleged intemperance, his was not the vice of the solitary drinker, and to-night the claret was nearly all drunk by Spinks and Soper.  It had the effect of waking in the commercial gentleman the demon of sociability that slept.

What Mr. Soper wanted to know was whether Rickman could recommend ’Armouth as a holiday resort?  Could he tell him of any first-class commercial hotel or boarding-house down there?  To which Rickman replied that he really couldn’t tell him anything at all.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Downey, peering over the edge of the table-cloth she was helping to fold.  “Perhaps he has his reasons.”