aid about them that they would. But I wrote to make sure....

"Gertie, d'you know that they're breaking their hearts for you?... that
there's nothing, in the whole world they want so much as that you
should come back?..."

"Give me the letter!"

"You've got a good heart yourself, Gertie; I know that well enough.
Think hard, before I give you the letter. Which is best--the Major and
this sort of life--and ... and--well, you know about the soul and God,
don't you?... or to go home, and--"

Her face shook all over for one instant.

"Give me the letter," she wailed suddenly.

Then Frank gave it her.

(V)

"But I can't possibly go home like this," whispered Gertie agitatedly in
the passage, after the Major's return half an hour later.

"Good Lord!" whispered Frank, "what an extraordinary girl you are, to
think--"

"I don't care. I can't, and I won't."

Frank cast an eye at the door, beyond which dozed the Major in the chair
before the fire.

"Well, what d'you want?"

"I want another dress, and ... and lots of things."

Frank stared at her resignedly.

"How much will it all come to?"

"I don't know. Two pounds--two pounds ten."

"Let's see: to-day's the twentieth. We must get you back before
Christmas. If I let you have it to-morrow, will it do?--to-morrow
night?"

She nodded. A sound came from beyond the door, and she fled.

* * * * *

I am not sure about the details of the manner in which Frank got the two
pounds ten, but I know he got it, and without taking charity from a
soul. I know that he managed somehow to draw his week's money two days
before pay-day, and for the rest, I suspect the pawnshop. What is quite
certain is that when his friends were able to take stock of his
belongings a little later, the list of them was as follows:

One jacket, one shirt, one muffler, a pair of trousers, a pair of socks,
a pair of boots, one cap, one tooth-brush, and a rosary. There was
absolutely nothing else. Even his razor was gone.

Things, therefore, were pretty bad with him on the morning of the
twenty-second of December. I imagine that he still possessed a few
pence, but out of this few pence he had to pay for his own and Gertie's
journey to Chiswick, as well as keep himself alive for another week. At
least, so he must have thought.

It must have been somewhere in Kensington High Street that he first had
a hint of a possibility of food to be obtained free, for, althou