gh I
find it impossible to follow all his movements during these days, it is
quite certain that he partook of the hospitality of the Carmelite
Fathers on this morning. He mentions it, with pleasure, in his diary.

It is a very curious and medieval sight--this feeding of the poor in the
little deep passage that runs along the outside of the cloister of the
monastery in Church Street. The passage is approached by a door at the
back of the house, opening upon the lane behind, and at a certain hour
on each morning of the year is thronged from end to end with the most
astonishing and deplorable collection of human beings to be seen in
London. They are of all ages and sizes, from seventeen to seventy, and
the one thing common to them all is extreme shabbiness and poverty.

A door opens at a given moment; the crowd surges a little towards a
black-bearded man in a brown frock, with an apron over it, and five
minutes later a deep silence, broken only by the sound of supping and
swallowing, falls upon the crowd. There they stand, with the roar of
London sounding overhead, the hooting of cars, the noise of innumerable
feet, and the rain--at least, on this morning--falling dismally down the
long well-like space. And here stand between two and three hundred men,
pinched, feeble, and yet wolfish, gulping down hot soup and bread,
looking something like a herd of ragged prisoners pent in between the
high walls.

Here, then, Frank stood in the midst of them, gulping his soup. His van
and horses, strictly against orders, remained in Church Street, under
the care of a passer-by, whom Frank seems to have asked, quite openly,
to do it for him for God's sake.

It is a dreary little scene in which to picture him, and yet, to myself,
it is rather pleasant, too. I like to think of him, now for the second
time within a few weeks, and all within the first six months of his
Catholic life, depending upon his Church for the needs of the body as
well as for the needs of the soul. There was nothing whatever to
distinguish him from the rest; he, too, had now something of that lean
look that is such a characteristic of that crowd, and his dress, too,
was entirely suitable to his company. He spoke with none of his hosts;
he took the basin in silence and gave it back in silence; then he wiped
his mouth on his sleeve, and went out comforted.

CHAPTER V

(I)

Dick Guiseley sat over breakfast in his rooms off Oxford Street,
entirely engrosse