are, however low they have fallen, because
they are my sisters and I love them."

"God bless ye, laddie! That's spoken like a man," said the old woman,
rising from her seat.

But John Storm's pale face had already flushed up to the eyes, and he
dropped his head as one who was ashamed.

II.

At eight o'clock that night John Storm was walking through the streets of
Soho. The bell of a jam factory had just been rung, and a stream of young
girls in big hats with gorgeous flowers and sweeping feathers were
pouring out of an archway and going arm-in-arm down the pavement. Men
standing in groups at street ends shouted to them as they passed, and
they shouted back in shrill voices and laughed with wild joy. In an alley
round one corner an organ man was playing "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," and some
of the girls began to dance and sing around him. Coming to the main
artery of traffic, they were almost run down by a splendid equipage which
was cutting across two thoroughfares into a square, and they screamed
with mock terror as the fat coachman in tippet and cockade bellowed to
them to get out of the way.

The square was a centre of gaiety. Theatres and music halls lined two of
its sides, and the gas on their facades and the beacons on their roofs
were beginning to burn brightly in the fading daylight. With skips and
leaps the girls passed over to the doors of these palaces, and peered
with greedy eyes through lines of policemen and doorkeepers in livery at
gentlemen, in shields of shirt-front and ladies in light cloaks and long
white gloves stepping out of gorgeous carriages into gorgeous halls.

John Storm was looking on at this masquerade when suddenly he became
aware that the flare of coarse lights on the front of the building before
him formed the letters of a word. The word was "GLORIA." Seeing it again
as he had seen it in the morning, but now identified and explained, he
grew hot and cold by turns, and his brain, which refused to think, felt
like a sail that is flapping idly on the edge of the wind.

There was a garden in the middle of the square, and he walked round and
round it. He gazed vacantly at a statue in the middle of the garden, and
then walked round the rails again. The darkness was gathering fast, the
gas was beginning to blaze, and he was like a creature in the coil of a
horrible fascination. That word, that name over the music hall, fizzing
and crackling in its hundred lights, seemed to hold him as by