Ordinarily, he permitted himself some nausea and ill-temper after a night’s debauch. This morning he would have none of them. “It would be churlish,” he thought, “to hand in my credentials with an ill-grace. If I have represented his sable majesty faithfully, he has his own good reasons, no doubt, for recalling me.” Therefore, to prove how the will can overcrow the nerve, he whistled on his way, and was very affable and kindly to all his fellows with whom he came in contact. They were not many at that early hour. An amazed roysterer waking on a step; a kennel-scraper driving his broom before him at a shambling trot; Giles the apprentice, yawning over the shutters, and a pretty mop-squeezer or so who affected a demure propriety as he waved a kiss to them in passing, and blushed and giggled when he had gone by. He turned into St. James’s Park, where Moll and Meg were tethering their cows at the sweet-stuff stalls; and bought and drank a glassful of white innocence with a sort of pleasant bravado of geniality. It made him feel good for the moment--pastoral and boyish once more. “What’s your wish in life, Molly?” he said, turning with a smile to the girl who had supplied him. “Sure your honour’s quizzing!” “No, I’m not. In truth now?” “Tea at Bagnigge Wells, then, with china and a gilt spoon.” He burst out laughing and then looked grave. “Your ambition hath a goose-flight. What would you give for the treat?” “Anything but my good name.” “I stand corrected, sweetling. Here, take your golden egg, and never part with your goose.” He took her chin in his hand. “Bite,” he said, and clipped a guinea between her white teeth. “That shall go to my credit,” he said to himself as he walked off; and made his way slowly to his rooms in Whitehall. Therein he did not remain long, but came out very shortly, a pocket of his riding-coat bulged in a sinister manner. He went down the Strand and Fleet Street, at a faster pace now, passed Temple Bar, with its three gaunt spikes yet shooting from the topmost arch, like dry stalks from which the ugly blossom had long withered and fallen, and turning into the cloisteral recesses of the Temple, fell loitering again, moved by the silence and antiquity of the place. It was a fresh-blown morning, sweet with virginal sunshine, and the old haunted walls and windows of the courts seemed elbowing one another in eagerness to obtain largesse of light. Glancing upward, he read on a dial set in the stained red brick wall of a house in the Inner Temple--“Begone about your business.” “A sexton’s motto,” he murmured. “Must leisure be always a stolen happiness, and every clock a treadmill for Time to toil on? But I accept the churlish reminder,” and he made his way, with a melancholy smile, to a rearward gate in the river wall, and came out upon a flight of stone steps, that went down through ooze and slime to the water level.