ad
name is a stain which no washing can efface; it clings wherever you go,
and often men who see it see nothing else in you but the scar.

So thought poor Jeffreys as he slowly turned his back on all that was
dear to him in life, and went out into the night of the unsympathetic
city.

At first, as I said, he tried to hold up his head. He inquired in one
or two quarters for work. But the question always came up--

"What is your character?"

"I have none," he would say doggedly.

"Why did you leave your last place?"

"I was turned away."

"What for?"

"Because I am supposed to have killed a boy once."

Once indeed he did get a temporary job at a warehouse--as a porter--and
for a week, a happy week, used his broad back and brawny arms in
carrying heavy loads and lifting weights. Hope sprang again within him
as he laboured. He might yet, by beginning at the lowest step, rise
above his evil name and conquer it.

Alas! One day a shilling was lost from the warehouseman's desk.
Jeffreys had been seen near the place and was suspected. He resented
the charge scornfully at first, then savagely, and in an outbreak of
rage struck his accuser. He was impeached before the head of the firm,
and it was discovered that he had come without a character. That was
enough. He was bundled out of the place at five minutes' notice, with a
threat of a policeman if he made it six. And even when a week later the
shilling was found in the warehouseman's blotting-paper, no one doubted
that the cashiered rogue was as cunning as he was nefarious.

After that he had given up what seemed the farce of holding up his head.
What was the use, he said, when, as sure as night follows day, that bad
name of his dogged him wherever he went?

So Jeffreys began to go down. In after years he spoke very little of
those six months in London, and when he did it was about people he had
met, and not about himself. What he did, where he lodged, how he lived,
these were matters he never mentioned and never liked to be asked about.

I am quite sure myself that the reason of this silence was not shame.
He was not one of those fellows who revenge themselves on fate by
deliberately going to the bad. At his worst, he had no taste for vice
or any affinity for it. He may have sunk low, not because he himself
was low, but because in his miserable feud with all the world he scorned
not to share the lot of others as miserable as himself.

His money--h