“H’m!  I suppose that’s why I couldn’t get a word out of Mrs. Clover.  Have the door mended, Mrs. Bubb, and charge me with it.  Got anything to drink handy?”

“That I ’aven’t, Mr. Gammon, except water.”

Gammon looked at his watch.

“Why, it’s only just half-past eleven.  Hanged if I didn’t think it was past midnight!  I must go round and get a drop of something.”

When he came back from quenching his thirst the house was in darkness.  He strode the familiar ascent, and by Polly’s door (barricaded inside with the chest of drawers) hummed a mirthful strain.  As he jumped into bed the events of the evening all at once struck him in such a comical light that he uttered a great guffaw, and for the next ten minutes he lay under the bedclothes shaking with laughter.

CHAPTER XI

THE NOSE OF THE TREFOYLES

At noon next day a cab drove up to Mrs. Bubb’s house; from it alighted Miss Sparkes, who, with the help of the cabman, brought downstairs a tin box, a wooden box, two bandboxes, and three newspaper bundles.  With no one did she exchange a word of farewell; the Cheesemans’ were out, the landlady and Moggie kept below stairs.  So Polly turned her back upon Kennington Road, and shook the dust thereof from her feet for ever.

Willingly she had accepted a proposal that she should share the room of her friend Miss Waghorn, who was to be married in a month’s time to Mr. Nibby, and did not mind a little inconvenience.  The room was on the third floor of a house at the north end of Shaftesbury Avenue; it measured twelve feet by fourteen.  When Polly’s bandboxes had been thrust under the bed and her larger luggage built up in a corner, there was nice standing room both for her and Miss Waghorn.  The house contained ten rooms in all, and its population (including seven children) amounted to twenty-three.  In this warm weather the atmosphere within doors might occasionally be a trifle close, but Shaftesbury Avenue is a fine broad street, and has great advantages of situation.

To Mr. Gammon’s casual inquiry, Mrs. Bubb replied that she neither knew nor cared whither Polly had betaken herself.  Himself having no great curiosity in the matter, and being much absorbed in his endeavour to obtain an engagement with the house of Quodling, he let Polly slip from his mind for a few days, until one morning came a letter from her.  Positively, and to his vast surprise, a letter addressed to him by Miss Sparkes, with her abode fully indicated in the usual place.  True, the style of the epistle was informal.  It began: 

“You took advantage of me because there wasn’t a man in the house to take my part, as I don’t call that grinning monkey of a Cheeseman a man at all.  If you like to call where I am now, I shall have the pleasure of introducing you to somebody that will give you the good hiding you deserve for being a coward and a brute.