“Where?—­” Edward’s articulation choked.

“Where they’re gone to, sir?  That I do not know.  Of course she will come back.”

The landlady begged him to wait; but to sit and see the minutes—­the black emissaries of perdition—­fly upon their business, was torture as big as to endure the tearing off of his flesh till the skeleton stood out.  Up to this point he had blamed himself; now he accused the just heavens.  Yea! is not a sinner their lawful quarry? and do they not slip the hounds with savage glee, and hunt him down from wrong to evil, from evil to infamy, from infamy to death, from death to woe everlasting?  And is this their righteousness?—­He caught at the rusty garden rails to steady his feet.

Algernon was employed in the comfortable degustation of his breakfast, meditating whether he should transfer a further slice of ham or of Yorkshire pie to his plate, or else have done with feeding and light a cigar, when Edward appeared before him.

“Do you know where that man lives?”

Algernon had a prompting to respond, “Now, really! what man?” But passion stops the breath of fools.  He answered, “Yes.”

“Have you the thousand in your pocket?”

Algernon nodded with a sickly grin.

“Jump up!  Go to him.  Give it up to him!  Say, that if he leaves London on the instant, and lets you see him off—­say, it shall be doubled.  Stay, I’ll write the promise, and put my signature.  Tell him he shall, on my word of honour, have another—­another thousand pounds—­as soon as I can possibly obtain it, if he holds his tongue, and goes with you; and see that he goes.  Don’t talk to me on any other subject, or lose one minute.”

Algernon got his limbs slackly together, trying to think of the particular pocket in which he had left his cigar-case.  Edward wrote a line on a slip of note-paper, and signed his name beneath.  With this and an unsatisfied longing for tobacco Algernon departed, agreeing to meet his cousin in the street where Dahlia dwelt.

“By Jove! two thousand!  It’s an expensive thing not to know your own mind,” he thought.

“How am I to get out of this scrape?  That girl Rhoda doesn’t care a button for me.  No colonies for me.  I should feel like a convict if I went alone.  What on earth am I to do?”

It seemed preposterous to him that he should take a cab, when he had not settled upon a scheme.  The sight of a tobacconist’s shop charmed one of his more immediate difficulties to sleep.  He was soon enabled to puff consoling smoke.

“Ned’s mad,” he pursued his soliloquy.  “He’s a weather-cock.  Do I ever act as he does?  And I’m the dog that gets the bad name.  The idea of giving this fellow two thousand—­two thousand pounds!  Why, he might live like a gentleman.”

And that when your friend proves himself to be distraught, the proper friendly thing to do is to think for him, became eminently clear in Algernon’s mind.