“You’re right!” returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite affectionately. “—On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in confidence, to Tom-all-Alone’s and to keep the whole thing quiet ever afterwards and never mention it to anyone. That’s about your intentions, if I understand you?”
“You are right, sir. You are right,” says Mr. Snagsby.
“Then here’s your hat,” returns his new friend, quite as intimate with it as if he had made it; “and if you’re ready, I am.”
They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without a ruffle on the surface of his unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down into the streets.
“You don’t happen to know a very good sort of person of the name of Gridley, do you?” says Bucket in friendly converse as they descend the stairs.
“No,” says Mr. Snagsby, considering, “I don’t know anybody of that name. Why?”
“Nothing particular,” says Bucket; “only having allowed his temper to get a little the better of him and having been threatening some respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I have got against him—which it’s a pity that a man of sense should do.”
As they walk along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that however quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply, at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a police-constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices