But there an unexpected difficulty awaited him. He remembered the number, but he looked in vain for the name of Gordon Lowndes among the others that were painted on the passage wall as you went in. So he doubted his memory and tried other numbers; but results brought him back to the first, and he climbed upstairs in quest of the name that was not in the hall. He never found it; but as he reached the fourth landing a peal of unmistakable laughter came through a half-open door. And Harry took breath, for he had found his friend. "Very well," he heard a thin voice saying quietly, "since you refuse me the slightest satisfaction, Mr. Lowndes, I shall at once take steps." "Steps--steps, do you say?" roared Lowndes himself. "All right, take steps to the devil!" And a small dark man came flying through the door, which was instantly banged behind him. Harry caught him in his arms, and then handed him his hat, which was rolling along the stone landing. The poor man thanked him in an agitated voice, and was tottering down the stairs, when he turned, and with sudden fury shook his umbrella at the shut door. "The dirty scamp!" he cried. "The bankrupt blackguard!" Harry never forgot the words, nor the working, whiskered face of the man who uttered them. He stood where he was until the trembling footfalls came up to him no more. Then he knocked at the door. Lowndes himself flung it open, and the frown of a bully changed like lightning to the most benevolent and genial smile. "You!" he cried. "Come in, Ringrose--come in; I'm delighted to see you." "Yes, it's me," said Harry, letting drop the hearty hand which he felt to be a savage fist unclenched to greet him. "Who did you think it was?" "Why, the man you must have met upon the stairs! A little rat of a creditor I've chucked out this time, but will throw over the banisters if he dares to show his nose up here again." Harry was forcibly reminded of the butcher at Richmond. "So this is the other way of treating them?" said he. "This is the other way. Ha! ha! I recollect what you mean. Well, I have some sympathy with a small tradesman whom the fortune of war has kept out of his money for weeks and months; not a particle for a little Jew who has the insolence to come up here and browbeat and threaten me in my own office for a few paltry pounds! If he had written me a civil note, reminding me of the debt, which was really so small that I'd forgotten all about it, he should have had his money in time. Now he may whistle for it till he's black in the face!" Lowndes's indignation was so much more impressive than that of the little dark man on the stairs, that Harry's sympathies changed sides without his knowledge. He merely felt his heart warm to Lowndes as the latter took him by the arm and led him through the outer office (in which an undersized urchin was mastheaded on an abnormally high stool) into an inner one, where a red-nosed man sat at the far side of a large double desk.