"As _I_ understand it Mrs. Ransome's let me two rooms, and I've taken them." "That's right. But you can't have 'em." "But I've engaged them." "Sorry, Jujubes. You were a trifle previous. I'm not letting any rooms just yet." "Mrs. Ransome told me the contrary." "Then Mrs. Ransome didn't know what she was talking about." "Rats! When _you_ told _her_--" "It's immaterial," said Ranny, with great dignity, "what I told her. For I've changed my mind. See?" "You can't change it. You can't play fast and loose like that. I've engaged those rooms from a week to-day. Where am I to go to?" "You can go to hell if you like," said Ranny, with marked amiability. Up to that point Mercier had been amiable too. But when Ranny told him where he might go to he began to look unpleasant. Unpleasant, not dangerous; oh no, not dangerous at all. Ranny looked at him and thought how he would go in like a pillow if you prodded him, and of the jelly, the jelly on the floor, he would make if you pounded. "You've got to account to me for this," said Mercier. "Those rooms are let to me from the thirteenth, and on the thirteenth I come into them, or you pay me fifteen bob for the week's rent." "Have you got that down in black and white?" He had not. "Well--if you come into those rooms on the thirteenth I shouldn't wonder if you get it down in black and blue." Whereupon Mercier pretended that he was only joking. He was glad that the counter was between him and young Randall, the silly ass. And Ranny said it was all right and offered him (magnanimously) the fifteen shillings, which Mercier (magnanimously) refused on the grounds that he had been joking. Then Ranny, beholding Jujubes for the lamentably flabby thing he was, and considering that after all he had not dealt quite fairly with him, undertook to find him quarters equal if not superior to Granville; where, he assured him, he would not be comfortable. And having shaken hands with Jujubes across the barrier of the counter, he strode out of the shop with a formidable tightening and rippling of muscles under his thin suit. Mercier leaned back against the shelves of white jars and pondered. Recovering presently, he made a minute inspection of his finger nails. He then stroked his mustache into a tighter curl that revealed the rich red curve of his upper lip. And as he caught the pleasing reflection of himself in the looking-glass panel opposite he smiled with a peculiar atrocity. Up till then his mood had been the petty fury of a shopman balked of his bargain and insulted. Now, in that moment, the moment of his recovery, another thought had occurred to Mercier. It accounted for his smile. * * * * *