“His enthusiasm grated upon my finer feelings.  I told him curtly that the man’s cynicism was simply abominable.

“‘Oh, abominable! abominable!’ assented my friend, effusively.  ’And then, you know, he likes to have his little joke sometimes,’ he added in a confidential tone.

“I fail to understand the connection of this last remark.  I have been utterly unable to discover where in all this the joke comes in.”

AN INDIGNANT TALE

THE BRUTE

Dodging in from the rain-swept street, I exchanged a smile and a glance with Miss Blank in the bar of the Three Crows.  This exchange was effected with extreme propriety.  It is a shock to think that, if still alive, Miss Blank must be something over sixty now.  How time passes!

Noticing my gaze directed inquiringly at the partition of glass and varnished wood, Miss Blank was good enough to say, encouragingly: 

“Only Mr. Jermyn and Mr. Stonor in the parlour with another gentleman I’ve never seen before.”

I moved towards the parlour door.  A voice discoursing on the other side (it was but a matchboard partition), rose so loudly that the concluding words became quite plain in all their atrocity.

“That fellow Wilmot fairly dashed her brains out, and a good job, too!”

This inhuman sentiment, since there was nothing profane or improper in it, failed to do as much as to check the slight yawn Miss Blank was achieving behind her hand.  And she remained gazing fixedly at the window-panes, which streamed with rain.

As I opened the parlour door the same voice went on in the same cruel strain: 

“I was glad when I heard she got the knock from somebody at last.  Sorry enough for poor Wilmot, though.  That man and I used to be chums at one time.  Of course that was the end of him.  A clear case if there ever was one.  No way out of it.  None at all.”

The voice belonged to the gentleman Miss Blank had never seen before.  He straddled his long legs on the hearthrug.  Jermyn, leaning forward, held his pocket-handkerchief spread out before the grate.  He looked back dismally over his shoulder, and as I slipped behind one of the little wooden tables, I nodded to him.  On the other side of the fire, imposingly calm and large, sat Mr. Stonor, jammed tight into a capacious Windsor armchair.  There was nothing small about him but his short, white side-whiskers.  Yards and yards of extra superfine blue cloth (made up into an overcoat) reposed on a chair by his side.  And he must just have brought some liner from sea, because another chair was smothered under his black waterproof, ample as a pall, and made of three-fold oiled silk, double-stitched throughout.  A man’s hand-bag of the usual size looked like a child’s toy on the floor near his feet.