part with a handsome deposit. I was sent down there
with him and at first he cracked it up like a real hustler. He got me
so fixed that I had practically made up my mind and was ready to sign
any reasonable agreement. Then he suddenly seemed to turn round. He
looked me straight in the face and told me about the typhoid and all of
it, explained that it wasn't the business of the firm to let houses
likely to interest me, and wound up by giving me your name and address
and recommending me to come to you."

"You surprise me very much indeed," Mr. Miller admitted. "Under the
circumstances, it is scarcely to be wondered at that he is out of
employment. Old Waddington wouldn't have much use for a man like that."

"I shouldn't be surprised," Mr. Lynn remarked thoughtfully, "if it was
through my affair that he got the sack. Couldn't you do something for
him, Mr. Miller--to oblige me, eh?"

"If he calls again," Mr. Miller promised, "I will do my best."

But Burton did not call again. He made various efforts to obtain a
situation in other directions, without the slightest result. Then he
gave it up. He became a wanderer about London, one of her children who
watched her with thoughtful eyes at all times and hours of the day and
night. He saw the pink dawn glimmer through the trees in St. James's
Park. He saw the bridges empty, the smoke-stained buildings deserted by
their inhabitants, with St. Paul's in the background like a sentinel
watching over the sleeping world. He heard the crash and roar of life
die away and he watched like an anxious prophet while the city slept.
He looked upon the stereotyped horrors of the Embankment, vitalized and
actual to him now in the light of his new understanding. He wandered
with the first gleam of light among the flower-beds of the Park,
sniffing with joy at the late hyacinths, revelling in the cool, sweet
softness of the unpolluted air. Then he listened to the awakening, to
the birth of the day. He heard it from the bridges, from London Bridge
and Westminster Bridge, over which thundered the great vans fresh from
the country, on their way to Covent Garden. He stood in front of the
Mansion House and watched the thin, black stream of the earliest corners
grow into a surging, black-coated torrent. There were things which made
him sorry and there were things which made him glad. On the whole,
however, his isolated contemplation of what for so long he had taken as
a matter of course depressed him