found employment with a farmer; but we quarrelled after a few weeks; for
once he wished to strike me; and somehow or other I could work, but not
serve. Winter had begun when we parted.--Oh, such a winter!--Then--then
I knew what it was to be houseless. How I lived for some months--if to
live it can be called--it would pain you to hear, and humble me to tell.
At last, I found myself again in London; and one evening, not many days
since, I resolved at last--for nothing else seemed left, and I had not
touched food for two days--to come to you."

"And why did that never occur to you before?"!

"Because," said Philip, with a deep blush,--"because I trembled at the
power over my actions and my future life that I was to give to one, whom
I was to bless as a benefactor, yet distrust as a guide."

"Well," said Love, or Gawtrey, with a singular mixture of irony and
compassion in his voice; "and it was hunger, then, that terrified you at
last even more than I?"

"Perhaps hunger--or perhaps rather the reasoning that comes from hunger.
I had not, I say, touched food for two days; and I was standing on
that bridge, from which on one side you see the palace of a head of the
Church, on the other the towers of the Abbey, within which the men I
have read of in history lie buried. It was a cold, frosty evening, and
the river below looked bright with the lamps and stars. I leaned, weak
and sickening, against the wall of the bridge; and in one of the arched
recesses beside me a cripple held out his hat for pence. I envied
him!--he had a livelihood; he was inured to it, perhaps bred to it; he
had no shame. By a sudden impulse, I, too, turned abruptly round--held
out my hand to the first passenger, and started at the shrillness of my
own voice, as it cried 'Charity.'"

Gawtrey threw another log on the fire, looked complacently round the
comfortable room, and rubbed his hands. The young man continued,--

"'You should be ashamed of yourself--I've a great mind to give you to
the police,' was the answer, in a pert and sharp tone. I looked up, and
saw the livery my father's menials had worn. I had been begging my
bread from Robert Beaufort's lackey! I said nothing; the man went on his
business on tiptoe, that the mud might not splash above the soles of his
shoes. Then, thoughts so black that they seemed to blot out every star
from the sky--thoughts I had often wrestled against, but to which I now
gave myself up with a sort of mad joy--seized