“No? Well, if I were you I’d cultivate the feeling now. Send in the barber on your way to the bath, and hand down that ink bottle from the shelf before you go. Pah! you can’t even fill an ink bottle, your hand shakes so! Upon my word, if I have to sack you I don’t know what you’ll do, you aren’t worth fourpence a week in this condition.” Tolly gave a dumb shudder and his fang kept time to it. Five years before, Strange had picked him up out of a sewer, where he went to learn the trade of ratting. Strange liked to learn the ins and outs of anything that had any suggestion of human interest in it. He had brought the half-dead, mouldy creature to his rooms, and after saving his life, it struck him to keep it, and see what could be done with it. This was the result. As long as Strange was at home Tolly kept straight, but directly he was out of reach, the miserable absorbing craving took hold of the wretch, and pinched, and pulled, and nipped, as with raging hot irons, at the very soul of him, till at last he swallowed his humanity at a gulp, gave way to the beast, and fled to the gin-shop. For three weeks he had endured the torture this last time, Strange thought with grim pity, as he watched him, through the heavy Eastern curtains, devouring his food to the dropping of tears. “Poor beggar! I shall never be able to get rid of him as long as life holds whatever morsel of soul he may have in him. Meanwhile, I cannot stand that solitary fang; when he has got over his brew I shall get him a set of teeth.” He lay back and laughed. “They’ll be the ruin of his immortal soul, those teeth; fancy the grin of the fellow when his lips have a resisting surface to stretch across! Brown will charge frightfully for filling such a cavern.” He laughed again and turned to his work, and in two hours he had the first batch of “copy” ready for the printer. Then he yawned and stretched, and apologized to the barber, whom he had kept waiting an hour and ten minutes. When he was shaved, he dressed, and set forth to resume civilization. CHAPTER XVII. WHEN he got outside his rooms, which were in a turning off Piccadilly, Strange looked up and down the street and at his watch. “I shall not bother with luncheon, that ham will last till eight,” he said, “I shall go to the Club and I suppose I must see Aunt Moll. I’ll go there to tea, she’ll be up probably, and perhaps awake by that time.” He struck out for his Club and made a rapid tour of the premises but he found there was no good to be got there, the billiard-rooms were empty and the reading-rooms were given over to half a dozen old fellows suffering from gout and senile decay. “It’s too early and too late for anything,” he muttered, as he lighted a fresh cigar on the steps, “it will be a full week, besides, before I get into the swing again. I shall try Brydon.”