cally. I saw that he was even
thinner than before. Was he, I wondered, "infernally hungry" at this very
minute?

"John," he said, looking into my eyes: "You can help me if you will. We're
friends, aren't we?"

I let him see that I was all on fire to help him, and it was then that he
made his wonderful suggestion.

"Would it be possible to evade your governess long enough to come and have
a bite with me?"

Dinner with Harry! In his own room! What an adventure to repeat to Angel
and The Seraph! Without further parley I set off down Henwood street at a
trot lest Mrs. Handsomebody should spy me from her bedroom window, in a
fateful way she had. Harry hurried after me, catching my arm and drawing me
close to him.

"What a plucky little shaver you are, John," he said. "I know she's a
corker, but I think you and I are a match for her, eh?"

I strode beside him breathless. I felt taller, stronger, than ever before.
By contrast with our masculinity Mrs. Handsomebody seemed a rather pitiful
old woman.

We spoke little, but hurried through many streets, till, at last, we came
to the narrow dingy one where I had first seen Harry. We turned down an
alley beside a green grocer's shop and entered a narrow doorway into the
strangest passage I had ever seen.

It was damp and chill. The floor was paved with dark red bricks and the
walls were stone. On our left I glimpsed a dim closet where a woman with
fat arms was dipping milk out of what looked like a zinc-covered box. On
our right rose the steepest, most winding staircase imaginable; and close
to the wall beside the stairs towered a giant grapevine whose stem was as
thick as a man's arm. After an eccentric curve or two, this amazing vine
disappeared through a convenient hole in the roof. I was lost in admiration
and should have liked to stop and examine it, but Harry urged me up the
stairs.

"How is that for steep?" he demanded, at the top. "Winded, eh? Now these
are my digs, John--" and he threw open a door with a flourish.

It was a shabby little room with a threadbare carpet, yet it wore an air of
adventure somehow. The lamp shade had a daring tilt to it; the blind had
been run up askew; and the red table cover had been pushed back to make
room for a mound of books. Harry's bed looked as though he had been having
a pillow fight. Surely not with the fat lady downstairs.

Harry was clearing the table by tossing the books into the middle of the
bed. "We're going to have