cotta, and quite unimposing, lacking in the spectacular effect; like
nearly everything in the Five Towns, carelessly and scornfully ugly! The
mean, swinging double-doors returned to the assault when you pushed
them, and hit you viciously. In a dark, countered room marked
"Enquiries" there was nobody.

"Hi, there!" called the doctor.

A head appeared at a door.

"Mr Buchanan upstairs?"

"Yes," snapped the head, and disappeared.

Up a dark staircase we went, and at the summit were half flung back
again by another self-acting door.

In the room to which we next came an old man and a youngish one were
bent over a large, littered table, scribbling on and arranging pieces of
grey tissue paper and telegrams. Behind the old man stood a boy. Neither
of them looked up.

"Mr Buchanan in his--" the doctor began to question. "Oh! There you
are!"

The editor was standing in hat and muffler at the window, gazing out.
His age was about that of the doctor--forty or so; and like the doctor
he was rather stout and clean-shaven. Their Scotch accents mingled in
greeting, the doctor's being the more marked. Buchanan shook my hand
with a certain courtliness, indicating that he was well accustomed to