bundle of cigars.

"'Ere, boys," she said, "let's talk 'am and heggs. 'Ere's a drop of the
best and five bob's worth of chimney afire, stun me mother if there
ain't. I'm sick of talkin' and so's 'the Panerawma.' Light up yer
sherbooks and think as you're in Buckingem Peliss. There ain't no 'arm
thinkin' anyways."

"I dreamed last night," said the Archbishop very sadly, "that this
cellar had become a cottage and that the sun was shining in it."

"I never dream," said "the Panorama," stoically; "put my head on the
floor and I won't lift it until the clock strikes ten."

"Then begin now, my dear," exclaimed the Lady Sarah with a sudden
tenderness, "put it there now and forget what London is ter you and me."

The words were uttered almost with a womanly tenderness, not without its
influence upon the company. Some phrase spoken of Frivolity's mouth had
touched this group of outcasts and spoken straight to their hearts. They
bandied, pleasantries no more, but lighting the cigars--the Lady Sarah
boldly charging a small clay pipe--they fell to an expressive silence,
of introspection, it may be, or even of unutterable despair. The woman
alone amongst them had not been cast down from a comparative altitude to
this very abyss of destitution. For the others life was a vista far
behind them; a vista, perchance, of a cottage and the sunshine, as the
parson had said; an echo of voices from a forgotten world; the memory of
a hand that was cold and of dead faces reproaching them. Such pauses are
not infrequent in the conversation of the very poor. Men bend their
heads to destiny less willingly than we think. The lowest remembers the
rungs of the ladder he has descended.

Alban had lighted one of the cigars and he smoked it stoically,
wondering again why the caves attracted him and what there was in this
company which should not have made him ashamed of such associations.
That he was not ashamed admitted of no question. In very truth, the
humanities were conquering him in spite of inherited prejudice. Had the
full account of it been written down by a philosopher, such a sage would
have said that the girl Sarah stood for a type of womanly pity, of
sympathy, and, in its way, of motherhood; qualities which demand no gift
of birth for their appeal. The unhappy parson, too, was there not much
of good in him, and might he not yet prove a human field worthy to be
tilled by a husbandman of souls? His humor was kindly; his disposition
gent