"If by that you mean I have no knowledge of the quality of every tap in the metropolis, you are right, and, what is more, I do not want to have anything to do with poetry or imagination if either assumes that particular development." "We put all those things on one side for an instant," suggested Kleinwort, making a sudden dive into a tavern which occupied a non-conspicuous position in an alley through which they were passing, leaving Werner standing on the pavement wet as a brook from the torrents of rain that were at last coming down as if a second deluge had commenced. When Kleinwort reappeared, which he did almost immediately, his cheeks had resumed their natural hue, and the hand which grasped his umbrella was steady enough. "If I drank as much as you," commented Mr. Werner, "I should go mad." "And if I drank as you so little I should go mad," was the answer. "You have got in your lovely English some vulgar saying about meat and poison." "Yes, and you will have something which is called _delirium tremens_ one of these days if you do not mind what you are about." "Shall I? No, I think not. When the engine has not need to work no longer, it will be that I lower the steam. Some day, some blessed day, I shall return to mine own land to there take mine ease." "I wish to God you had never left it," muttered Henry Werner, and it was after the exchange of these amenities that the pair ascended to the offices of Asherill and Swanland, Salisbury House. CHAPTER III. MR. DEAN AND HIS FUTURE RELATIVES. It was quite dark by the time Mr. Swanland's clerks reached Homewood on the rainy Saturday in question. In the first place they lost their train by about half a minute, which was not of much consequence as another started in less than half an hour afterwards, but Mr. Bailey chose to lose his temper, and exchanged some pleasant words first with a porter who shut the door in his face, and afterwards with a burly policeman big enough to have carried the little clerk off in his arms like a baby. The young gentlemen, engaged at a few shillings a week to perform liquidation drudgery in Messrs. Asherill and Swanland's offices, were so accustomed to regard the members of their firm as autocrats that they affected the airs of autocrats themselves when out of the presence chamber, and were consequently indignant if the outer world, happily ignorant of the nature of accountants, treated them as if they were very ordinary mortals indeed.