, s'welp me Gawd I
did."

The admission was received with a shout of laughter from the window
above, where a red-haired girl leaned pensively upon the rail of a
broken balcony. The speaker, in her turn, moved away with a youth who
asked her, with much unnecessary emphasis, "what the 'ell she had to do
with Albey's feet and why she couldn't leave Chris Denham alone."

"If I ain't 'xactly gawn on Russian taller myself, wot's agen Albey
a-doin' of it," he asked authoritatively. "Leave the lidy alone and
don't arst no questions. They say as the old man is took with spasms
round at the Union. S'welp me if Albey ain't in luck--at his time of
life too."

He winked at the girl, who had put her arm boldly round his waist, and
marched on with the proud consciousness that his cleverness had not
failed to make a just impression. The red-haired girl of the pensive
face still gazed dreamily down the court and her head inclined a little
toward the earth as though she were listening for the sound of a
footstep. Not only the dreamer of dreams in that den of squalor, this
Alban Kennedy was her idol to-night as he had been the idol of fifty of
her class since he came to live among them. What cared she for his
ragged shoes or the frayed collar about his neck? Did not the whole
community admit him to be a very aristocrat of aristocrats, a diamond of
class in a quarry of ashes, a figure at once mysterious and heroical?
And this knight of the East, what irony led him away with that
white-faced Pole, Lois Boriskoff? What did he see in her? What was she
to him?

The pensive head was withdrawn sadly from the window at last. Silence
fell in the dismal court. The Russians who had been breathing fire and
vengeance were now eating smoked sturgeon and drinking vodki. A man
played the fiddle to them and some danced. After all, life has something
else than the story of wrong to tell us sometimes.

CHAPTER II

ALBAN KENNEDY MAKES A PROMISE

The boy and the girl halted together by one of the great lights at the
corner of the Commercial Road and there they spoke of the strange
confession which had just fallen from Paul Boriskoff's lips. Little
Lois, white-faced as a mime at the theatre, her black hair tousled and
unkempt, her eyes shining almost with the brightness of fever, declared
all her heart to the gentle Alban and implored him for God's sake to
take her from London and this pitiful home. He, as discreet as she was
rash, pitied her