His voice was deeper than usual, and he went to bed to sleep, throwing himself down with a coarse wholesome scorn of his nervousness.

He awoke after dawn, and for a moment curled in happy wriggles of satisfaction over a good sleep.  Then he remembered that he was in the cold and friendless prison of England, and lay there panting with desire to get away, to get back to America, where he would be safe.

He wanted to leap out of bed, dash for the Liverpool train, and take passage for America on the first boat.  But perhaps the officials in charge of the emigrants and the steerage (and of course a fellow would go steerage to save money) would want to know his religion and the color of his hair—­as bad as trying to ship.  They might hold him up for a couple of days.  There were quarantines and customs and things, of which he had heard.  Perhaps for two or even three days more he would have to stay in this nauseating prison-land.

This was the morning of August 3, 1910, two weeks after his arrival in London, and twenty-two days after victoriously reaching England, the land of romance.

CHAPTER VII

HE MEETS A TEMPERAMENT

Mr. Wrenn was sulkily breakfasting at Mrs. Cattermole’s Tea House, which Mrs. Cattermole kept in a genteel fashion in a basement three doors from his rooming-house on Tavistock Place.  After his night of fear and tragic portents he resented the general flowered-paper-napkin aspect of Mrs. Cattermole’s establishment.  “Hungh!” he grunted, as he jabbed at the fringed doily under the silly pink-and-white tea-cup on the green-and-white lacquered tray brought him by a fat waitress in a frilly apron which must have been made for a Christmas pantomime fairy who was not fat.  “Hurump!” he snorted at the pictures of lambs and radishes and cathedrals and little duckies on Mrs. Cattermole’s pink-and-white wall.

He wished it were possible—­which, of course, it was not—­to go back to the St. Brasten Cocoa House, where he could talk to the honest flat-footed galumping waitress, and cross his feet under his chair.  For here he was daintily, yes, daintily, studied by the tea-room habitues—­two bouncing and talkative daughters of an American tourist, a slender pale-haired English girl student of Assyriology with large top-barred eye-glasses over her protesting eyes, and a sprinkling of people living along Tavistock Place, who looked as though they wanted to know if your opinions on the National Gallery and abstinence were sound.

His disapproval of the lambiness of Mrs. Cattermole’s was turned to a feeling of comradeship with the other patrons as he turned, with the rest, to stare hostilely at a girl just entering.  The talk in the room halted, startled.

Mr. Wrenn gasped.  With his head solemnly revolving, his eyes followed the young woman about his table to a table opposite.  “A freak!  Gee, what red hair!” was his private comment.