It'll cost you more than all your eel-pies, and lobsters, and flash toggery put together." Fancy, reader, my amazement and horror at all this! It might be a joke to all the rest, but it was anything but a joke to me.

Instead of the Field-Marshal it might have been I who was caught last night and locked up in a police cell, and what then would have become of me?
My "friends" would all have laughed at it as a joke; but to me, I knew full well, it would have been disgrace and ruin! I was in no humour to pursue the conversation, particularly as Jack Smith entered at that moment, composed and solemn as ever, without even a glance at me.
My only escape from wretched memories and uncomfortable reflections was in hard work, and that day I worked desperately.

I was engaged in checking some very elaborate accounts under Doubleday's direction the whole day.

It was a task which Wallop, to whom it fell by rights, shirked and passed on to me, greatly to my indignation, a week ago.

But now it proved a very relief.