rent. Of course, I can't at present
contribute anything for my board and lodging and my clothes." He
stopped, a minute, and looked down at his shabby overcoat, then lifted
his eyes, alight with their soft, irresistible appeal, to the
physician's face; his voice dropped in a kind of awe. "This berth
carries a pound a week, sir. It would be all the world to me to get
it."

"You want me to perjure myself?"

Peter did not shrink from the stern tone, nor blush at the imputation.
"I want you not to take away my chance," he said.

He did not leave for some fifteen minutes longer, and when he did
leave, it was with eyes lit almost to rapture, a glow of happiness on
his pale face, and words of thanks bubbling forth from trembling lips.
The doctor had consented not to conceal the state of the young man's
predisposition to tubercular mischief, but to make the best of his
chance of escaping the family taint. He had promised, too, to explain
matters to one of the managers with whom he was on very friendly terms.
Peter's position at Clomayne's was assured.

"I will never forget it, sir, never!" the boy said, stopping again at
the door of the consulting-room to reiterate the fact. "It will be the
making of me. I shall get on--you'll see I will. There's men that don't
make the most of their chances--but I will. I've got a splendid
one--thanks to your goodness--and I will. I feel it in me. You'll never
regret it."

"Oh, that'll do--that'll do," the doctor said. He was a little ashamed
of his weakness in the matter, knew it was a bad precedent, didn't wish
to hear any more about it. "Haven't you got something warmer to put
on?" he asked. "You're not going out into this pouring rain in that
thin coat?"

"This is my great-coat, sir," Peter explained, with a glance at the
sleeve that exposed the flat red wrist. "And Cicely is waiting outside
for me with an umbrella."

The doctor was sufficiently interested to walk to that window in his
consulting-room which looked upon the street in order to watch the
youth who had taken what was in his experience the very unusual course
of questioning his fiat. He saw the stooping figure of the lad join the
upright one of the child, hurrying to meet him. He almost saw the glad
words of the reversal of his doom upon the young man's lips; he saw the
change on the straight-featured serious face of the child from an
expression of unchildlike anxiety to one of almost womanly joy. The
pair stood for th