s, and an old parti-coloured "bouncer" for
a ball, were the last to take alarm at the lowering sky; nor was it till
the big drops fell in their midst that they scattered right and left,
and left the park empty.

No; not quite empty. One young man sat on through the rain on the seat
from which he had been watching the boys' game. A shabby, almost ragged
young man, with a disagreeable face and an almost contemptuous curl of
the lips, as the rain, gathering force every second, buffeted him in the
face and drenched him where he sat. There were a hundred seats more
sheltered than that on which he sat, and by walking scarcely fifty yards
he could have escaped the rain altogether. But he sat recklessly on,
and let the rain do its worst, his eyes still on the empty football
field, and his ears ringing still with the merry shouts of the departed
boys.

My reader, had he chanced to pass down that deserted walk on this stormy
afternoon, would hardly have recognised in the lonely occupant of that
seat the John Jeffreys he had seen six months ago at Clarges Street. It
was not merely that he looked haggard and ill, or that his clothes were
ragged. That was bad enough, but the reader has seen him in such a
plight before. But what he has not seen before--or if at all, only in
passing moments--is the bitter, hard look on his face, changing it
miserably. A stranger passing him that afternoon would have said--

"There sits a man who hates all the world."

We, who know him better, would have said--

"There sits our poor dog with a bad name, deserted even by hope."

And so it was.

Jeffreys had left Clarges Street smarting under a sense of injury, but
still resolved to keep up the fight for his good name, in which for so
many months past he had been engaged.

Not by appealing to Mr Rimbolt. Although he knew, had Mr Rimbolt been
at home, all this would not have happened, his pride forbade him now to
take a single step to reinstate himself in a house from which he had
been so ignominiously expelled. No, not even when that house held
within its walls Percy and Raby. The idea of going back filled him with
horror.

On the contrary, he would hide himself from them, even though they
sought to find him; and not till his name was as good as theirs would he
see them again or come near them.

Which surely was another way of resolving never to see them again; for
the leopard cannot change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin! A b