That was an assertion which no one could dispute. When the cab drove off again she repeated the former speech with an angry laugh. "It is ridiculous, Horace, that you and I should have to run about like this from pillar to post, as if papa could slip out of sight like a--like a--mere clerk." The mercantile world does not make much account of clerks, and she did not feel that she could find anything stronger to say. "Nobody would believe it," said Horace, "if we were to tell them; but in the City it will be different," he added, gravely. In Liverpool it must be allowed the City was not thought very much of. It had not the same prestige as the great mercantile town of the north. The merchant princes were considered to belong to the seaports, and the magnates of the City had an odour of city feasts and vulgarity about them; but in the present circumstances it had other attractions. "The name of Lycett-Landon can't be unknown there," said the lad. His mother was wounded even by this assertion. She drew herself up. "A Lycett-Landon has no right to be unknown anywhere," she said. "We don't need to take our importance from any firm, I hope. But London is insufferable; nobody is anybody that comes from what they are pleased to call the country 'here.'" There was an indignant tone in Mrs Lycett-Landon's voice. But yet she too felt, though she would not acknowledge it, that for once the City would be the most congenial. They drove along through the crowded, noisy streets in a hansom, feeling, after all, a little more at home among people who were evidently going to business as the men did in their own town. The sight of a well-brushed, well-washed, gold-chained commercial magnate in a white waistcoat with a rose in his button-hole did them good. And thus they arrived at "the office," that one home-like spot amid all the desert of unaccustomed streets. "Perhaps," the mother said, "we shall find him here, ready to laugh at us for this ridiculous expedition." "Well, I hope not," said Horace, "for he will be angry. Papa doesn't like to be looked after." This speech chilled Mrs Lycett-Landon a little, for it was quite true; and for her part she was not a woman who liked to be found fault with on account of silly curiosity. As a matter of fact, few women do. So that it was with a little check to their eagerness that they got out at the office door among all the press of people coming to their daily labour. Horace, though he had been intended to work there, scarcely knew the place; and his mother, though she had driven down three or four times to pick up her husband on the occasions when they were in town together, was but little better acquainted with it. And the clerks did not at all recognise these very unlikely visitors. Ladies appeared very seldom at the office, and at this early hour never.