e at an end.

An instant afterwards the central path by which he sat was thronged by
the revellers. In a many-coloured crowd, stocked and cravated with all
the bravery of buff and plum-colour and blue, the bucks of the town
passed and repassed with their high-waisted, straight-skirted,
be-bonneted ladies upon their arms.

It was not a decorous assembly. Many of the men, flushed and noisy, had
come straight from their potations. The women, too, were loud and
aggressive. Now and then, with a rush and a swirl, amid a chorus of
screams from the girls and good-humoured laughter from their escorts,
some band of high-blooded, noisy youths would break their way across the
moving throng. It was no place for the prim or demure, and there was a
spirit of good-nature and merriment among the crowd which condoned the
wildest liberty.

And yet there were some limits to what could be tolerated even by so
Bohemian an assembly. A murmur of anger followed in the wake of two
roisterers who were making their way down the path. It would, perhaps,
be fairer to say one roisterer; for of the two it was only the first who
carried himself with such insolence, although it was the second who
ensured that he could do it with impunity.

The leader was a very tall, hatchet-faced man, dressed in the very height
of fashion, whose evil, handsome features were flushed with wine and
arrogance. He shouldered his way roughly through the crowd, peering with
an abominable smile into the faces of the women, and occasionally, where
the weakness of the escort invited an insult, stretching out his hand and
caressing the cheek or neck of some passing girl, laughing loudly as she
winced away from his touch.

Close at his heels walked his hired attendant, whom, out of insolent
caprice and with a desire to show his contempt for the prejudices of
others, he had dressed as a rough country clergyman. This fellow
slouched along with frowning brows and surly, challenging eyes, like some
faithful, hideous human bulldog, his knotted hands protruding from his
rusty cassock, his great underhung jaw turning slowly from right to left
as he menaced the crowd with his sinister gaze. Already a close observer
might have marked upon his face a heaviness and looseness of feature, the
first signs of that physical decay which in a very few years was to
stretch him, a helpless wreck, too weak to utter his own name, upon the
causeway of the London streets. At present, howe