Algernon Sawby Leonidas (Sawby had been his mother's family name), and was now grown up to manhood. He had been at Cambridge, had taken his degree the year before, but had lingered off and on for his rowing, and "kept his fifth year." He divided his time between London lodgings and the last requirements of his college.
On that day in May with which I am dealing it was to consult upon this son of his that Mr. Brassington had left the crowd at Sir John Perkin's and had shut himself with Charles Kirby into the smoking-room.
Mr. Kirby was listening, for the fifteenth or twentieth time, to his friend's views upon Algernon Sawby Leonidas, which lad, in distant Cambridge, was at that moment doing precisely what his father and his father's lawyer were about, drinking port, but with no such long and honest life behind him as theirs.
It was Mr. Kirby's way to listen to anything his friends might have to say—it relieved them and did not hurt him. In the ordinary way he cared nothing whether he was hearing a friend's tale for the first or for the hundredth time; he had no nerves where friendship was concerned, and friendship was his hobby. But in this late evening he did feel a movement
