“Hang me, if I shall be able to,” was his next reflection; and with the remaining three and sixpence, he crossed the threshold of a tobacconist’s shop and bought cigars, to save himself from excesses in charity.  After gravely reproaching the tobacconist for the growing costliness of cigars, he came into the air, feeling extraordinarily empty.  Of this he soon understood the cause, and it amused him.  Accustomed to the smell of tobacco always when he came from his dinner, it seemed, as the fumes of the shop took his nostril, that demands were being made within him by an inquisitive spirit, and dissatisfaction expressed at the vacancy there.

“What’s the use?  I can’t dine,” he uttered argumentatively.  “I’m not going to change a note, and I won’t dine.  I’ve no Club.  There’s not a fellow I can see who’ll ask me to dine.  I’ll lounge along home.  There is some Sherry there.”

But Algernon bore vividly in mind that he did not approve of that Sherry.

“I’ve heard of fellows frying sausages at home, and living on something like two shillings a day,” he remarked in meditation; and then it struck him that Mrs. Lovell’s parcel of returned jewels lay in one of his drawers at home—­that is, if the laundress had left the parcel untouched.

In an agony of alarm, he called a cab, and drove hotly to the Temple.  Finding the packet safe, he put a couple of rings and the necklace with the opal in his waistcoat pocket.  The cabman must be paid, of course; so a jewel must be pawned.  Which shall it be? diamond or opal?  Change a dozen times and let it be the trinket in the right hand—­the opal; let it be the opal.  How much would the opal fetch?  The pawnbroker can best inform us upon that point.  So he drove to the pawnbroker; one whom he knew.  The pawnbroker offered him five-and-twenty pounds on the security of the opal.

“What on earth is it that people think disgraceful in your entering a pawnbroker’s shop?” Algernon asked himself when, taking his ticket and the five-and-twenty pounds, he repelled the stare of a man behind a neighbouring partition.

“There are not many of that sort in the kingdom,” he said to the pawnbroker, who was loftily fondling the unlucky opal.

“Well—­h’m; perhaps there’s not;” the pawnbroker was ready to admit it, now that the arrangement had been settled.

“I shan’t be able to let you keep it long.”

“As quick back as you like, sir.”

Algernon noticed as he turned away that the man behind the partition, who had more the look of a dapper young shopman than of a needy petitioner for loans or securities, stretched over the counter to look at the opal; and he certainly heard his name pronounced.  It enraged him; but policy counselled a quiet behaviour in this place, and no quarrelling with his pawnbroker.  Besides, his whole nature cried out for dinner.  He dined and had his wine; as good, he ventured to assert, as any man could get for the money; for he knew the hotels with the venerable cellars.