As for the muddle about her husband, be hanged to it!  He would think no more about the business.  Ten to one this address that Polly had obtained would be quite useless.  How could he go to strangers (named Gildersleeve) and coolly inquire of them whether they knew a man named Clover?  Of course they would have him kicked into the street, and Serve him right.

Polly and her boy!  A young City clerk, eh?  Old enough to wear a chimney-pot, he’d be bound.  Polly was fond of chimney-pots.  There, he had done with her, and with Clover and Quodling and Gildersleeve, and all the rest of the puzzle.

As he suddenly entered the house Moggie ran to him up the kitchen stairs.

“There’s been a gentleman for you, Mr. Gammon.”

“Oh!  Who was it?”

“Mr. Greenacres, driving a trap, and the ’orse wouldn’t stand still, and he said he’d see you some other time.”

“Greenacre, eh?  All right.”

He sat for a quarter of an hour in his bedroom, unable to decide how he should spend the rest of the day.  After all, perhaps, he ought not to have abandoned Polly so abruptly.  In her own way she had been doing him a kindness, and as for her temper, well, she couldn’t help it.

He would go to Dulwich and see the bow-wows.

CHAPTER XVI

AN ALLY IN THE QUEST

Commercially he was doing well.  Quodling and Son were more than satisfied with him.  Excellent prospects lay ahead, and this time it would assuredly be his own fault if he had not secured the permanency so much desired for him by Mrs. Clover.

By the by, would this make any difference?  What if he let Mrs. Clover know of his greatly improved position?  She might reconsider things.  And yet, as often as he thought of Minnie, he felt that her mother’s objection corresponded too well with the disposition of the girl.  Minnie was not for him.  Well and good, he would find somebody else.

Polly Sparkes?  Polly be hanged.  Why did her eyes and her teeth and her rosy cheeks keep plaguing him?  He had told himself times innumerable that he cared not a snap of the fingers for Polly and all her highly-coloured attractions.  If only he had not been such a fool as to treat her shabbily last Sunday morning!  He felt sorry, and couldn’t get rid of the vexation.

It worried him this afternoon as he left Quodlings in Norton Folgate and walked towards the Bank.  He was thinking, too, of a poor fellow with a large family for whom he had tried these last few days to find employment, without the usual success.  In Threadneedle Street a hand arrested him.

“Just the man I wanted,” said the voice of Mr. Greenacre.  He was in an elegant overcoat, with a silk hat of the newest fashion.  You remember your promise?

“What promise?”

“Nonsense!  But we can’t talk about it here.  Come to the Bilboes.  Don’t know the Bilboes?  What a mood you’re in to-day.”