Anything else that had ever passed between them was utterly out of it.

Well, she had wanted him to be impersonal! There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at him: "You're in trouble ?" "Horrid, horrid--there's a row!" But they parted, on it, in the next breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in her violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang with which, at Cocker's door, in his further precipitation, he closed the apron of the cab into which he had leaped.

As he rebounded to some other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman flashed straight away.
But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite, now, as she said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother.

Her companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the presence of his agitation, his mere scared exposed nature, she suddenly ceased to mind.
It came to her as it had never come to her before that with absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything off.

He had nothing to send--she was sure he had been wiring all over--and yet his business was evidently huge.