‘Lor, no, sir; he goes from place to place—in and out, and up and down. It wouldn’t be the least bit of good tryin’ to foller him. You might wait if you liked, on the chanc’t. He do sometimes come home betwigst one and two to take a mossel of bread-and-cheese and a glass of ale, if he’s going to make a extry long afternoon. But his general way is to come home to a tea-dinner betwigst five and six.’ ‘I’ll wait till two,’ said Geoffrey, ‘and if he’s not home by that time, I’ll leave a letter for him.’ So Mr. Hossack dismissed the cab, and went into his friend’s small parlour—such a dreary sitting-room as it seemed to eyes accustomed only to brightness: furniture so sordid; walls so narrow; ceiling darkened by the smoke of gas that had burned late into the long winter nights. Geoffrey looked round with a shudder. ‘And Lucius really lives here,’ he said to himself, ‘and is contented to work on, happy in the idea that he is a benefactor to his species—watching the measles of infancy, administering to the asthmas of old age. Thank God there are such men in the world,—and thank God I am not one of them!’ He looked round the room in quest of that refuge of shallow minds, the day’s paper; but newspaper there was none—only that poor little collection of books on the rickety chiffonier: well-thumbed volumes, wherewith Lucius had so often solaced his loneliness. ‘Shakespeare, Euripides, Montaigne, _Tristram Shandy_,’ muttered Geoffrey, running over the titles contemptuously. ‘Musty old buffers! Come out, old Shandy. I suppose you’re about the liveliest of the lot.’ He tried to settle himself on the feeble old sofa, too short and too narrow for muscular young Oxford; stretched his legs this way and that; read a few pages; smiled at a line here and there; yawned a good deal, and then threw the book aside with an exclamation of impatience. Those exuberant energies asked not repose; he wanted to be up and doing. His mind was full of his interview with Lady Baker, full of anxious longing thoughts about the woman he loved. ‘What became of that man we met in the forest?’ he asked of the unresponsive atmosphere. ‘If I could but track him to his miserable grave, and get a certificate of his death, what a happy fellow I should be.’ He paced the little room, looked out of the window at the enlivening traffic of the Shadrack-road; huge wagons laden with petroleum casks, timber, iron, cotton bales, grinding slowly along the macadam; an organ droning drearily on the other side of the way; a costermonger crying whelks and hot eels, as appropriate refreshment in the sultry August noontide; upon everything that faded, burnt-up aspect which pervades London at the end of summer; a universal staleness, an odour of doubtful fish and rotten fruit. After the space of an hour and a half, which to Geoffrey’s weariness had seemed interminable, a light step sounded on the little stone-paved approach; a latchkey clicked in the door, and Lucius came into the parlour.