I gave way to queer hesitations in pawning my two negotiable articles.  A weakly indisposition to pawn in Clayton, where the pawnbroker knew me, carried me to the door of the place in Lynch Street, Swathinglea, where I had bought my revolver.  Then came an idea that I was giving too many facts about myself to one man, and I came back to Clayton after all.  I forget how much money I got, but I remember that it was rather less than the sum I had made out to be the single fare to Shaphambury.  Still deliberate, I went back to the Public Library to find out whether it was possible, by walking for ten or twelve miles anywhere, to shorten the journey.  My boots were in a dreadful state, the sole of the left one also was now peeling off, and I could not help perceiving that all my plans might be wrecked if at this crisis I went on shoe leather in which I could only shuffle.  So long as I went softly they would serve, but not for hard walking.  I went to the shoemaker in Hacker Street, but he would not promise any repairs for me under forty-eight hours.

I got back home about five minutes to three, resolved to start by the five train for Birmingham in any case, but still dissatisfied about my money.  I thought of pawning a book or something of that sort, but I could think of nothing of obvious value in the house.  My mother’s silver—­two gravy-spoons and a salt-cellar—­had been pawned for some weeks, since, in fact, the June quarter day.  But my mind was full of hypothetical opportunities.

As I came up the steps to our door, I remarked that Mr. Gabbitas looked at me suddenly round his dull red curtains with a sort of alarmed resolution in his eye and vanished, and as I walked along the passage he opened his door upon me suddenly and intercepted me.

You are figuring me, I hope, as a dark and sullen lout in shabby, cheap, old-world clothes that are shiny at all the wearing surfaces, and with a discolored red tie and frayed linen.  My left hand keeps in my pocket as though there is something it prefers to keep a grip upon there.  Mr. Gabbitas was shorter than I, and the first note he struck in the impression he made upon any one was of something bright and birdlike.  I think he wanted to be birdlike, he possessed the possibility of an avian charm, but, as a matter of fact, there was nothing of the glowing vitality of the bird in his being.  And a bird is never out of breath and with an open mouth.  He was in the clerical dress of that time, that costume that seems now almost the strangest of all our old-world clothing, and he presented it in its cheapest form—­black of a poor texture, ill-fitting, strangely cut.  Its long skirts accentuated the tubbiness of his body, the shortness of his legs.  The white tie below his all-round collar, beneath his innocent large-spectacled face, was a little grubby, and between his not very clean teeth he held a briar pipe.  His complexion was whitish, and although he was only thirty-three or four perhaps, his sandy hair was already thinning from the top of his head.