Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/27

Rh and there wasn’t no beauty thrown away on him; plain he was, as ever I saw a man; and plainer.”

The fellow was ruder than ever. I am aware that Emily Purvis is a beauty, and that I am not, but at the same time one does not expect to be stopped and told so by two perfect strangers, at that hour of the night.

“For goodness’ sake,” I said to Tom, “let’s get away from these dreadful persons as fast as we possibly can.”

I made him come. The fat man called after us—in his squeaky treble.

“Dreadful, are we? Maybe you’ll change your mind before you’ve done. Don’t you be so fast in judging of your true friends, it don’t become a young woman. There’s more dreadful persons than us about, as perhaps you’ll find.”

“It is to be hoped,” I observed to Tom, and paying no attention whatever to Emily Purvis, who I knew was smiling on the other side of him, “that we shall meet no more objectionable characters before we get safely in.”

“They’re friends of yours, my dear.”

This was Emily.

“I don’t see how you make that out, seeing that I never saw them before, and never want to again.”

“Some of us have more friends than we know, my love.” Her love! “We’ve seen four of yours already; I shouldn’t be surprised if we saw another still before we’re in.”

As it happened, in a manner of speaking, it turned out that she was right; though, of course, to speak of the creature we encountered, even sarcastically, as a friend of mine, would be absurd. We were going along the Fenton Road. As we were passing a street, which branched off upon our right, there popped out of it, for all the world as if he had been waiting for us