The Argosy — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Roger Bevere. 37 time I had attracted attention, and silence fell on the room. Strong- minded Miss Panken came to the relief of her companion. “Tid you call for a glass of ale?” she asked me, in a tone of incipient mockery. ‘‘ Nor for soda P—nor bitters >—nor even cherry-brandy?” sheran on. “No? Then as you don’t seem to want anything we supply here, perhaps you'll betake yourself away, young man, and leave space for them that do. Fancy this room being open to promiscous enquirers, and us young ladies being obliged to answer ’em!” added Miss Panken affably to her two friends. ‘“ I’d like to see it!” Having thus put me down and turned her back upon me, I had nothing to wait for, and walked out of the lady’s presence. The younger one’s eyes followed me with a wistful look. I’m sure she would have given the address had she dared. After that day, I took to haunt the precincts of the Bell-and-Clapper, believing it to be my only chance of finding Bevere. Scott gota brief note from him, no address to it, stating that he was not yet well enough to resume his duties; and this note Scott forwarded to me. A letter also came to me from Lady Bevere asking what the matter was that I did not write, and whether Roger was worse. How could I write, unless I found him? So, all the leisure time that I could improvise I spent round about the Bell-and-Clapper. Not inside the room, amid its manifold attrac- tions : Circe was a wily woman, remember, and pretty bottles are insidi- ous. That particular Circe, also, Miss Panken, might have objected to my company and ordered me out of it. Up one road, down another, before this row of houses and that, I hovered for ever like a walking ghost. Now peering in at the oyster shops, and now at the grocers’ and bakers’, and especially at the perpetually opening door of that bar-room, and at the railway passengers that swung in and out of it. But I never saw Bevere. Luck favoured me at last. One afternoon towards the end of the week, I was standing opposite the church, watching the half-dozen worshippers straggling into it, for one of its many services, listening to the irritating ding-dong of its clanging bell, and wondering the noise was put up with, when suddenly Richard Scott came running up from the city train. Looking neither to the right nor the left, or he must inevitably have seen me, he made straight for a cross-road, then another, and presently entered one of a row of small houses whose lower rooms were on a level with the ground and the yard or two of square garden that fronted them. ‘“ Paradise Place.” I followed Scott at a cautious distance. *‘ Bevere lives there !” quoth I, mentally. Should I go in at once boldly, and beard him ? While deliberating — for somehow it goes against my nature to beard anybody—Scott came striding out and turned off the other way : which ledto the shops. I crossed over and went in quietly at the open door. Gomilichboo “Ss (E(@)