ly every day. I could see she was getting poorer and poorer,
and when at last I was discharged, the little rooms she took me to were
about as poor as they could be to be respectable.

"I'd hardly been back a week, when one day after going out to try to
sell some of my sketches, she came home ill and died quite suddenly. I
was all up a tree then--no money, no friends, no legs. I wrote to
Frampton, but he can't have got my letter. Then I got threatened with
eviction, and all but left out in the street, when the person old Mary
had sold my sketches to called round and ordered some more. I didn't
see him, but a brute of a woman who lived in the house did, and was cute
enough to see she could make a good thing out of me. So she took
possession of me, and ever since then I've been a prisoner, cut off from
the outside world as completely as if I had been in a dungeon, grinding
out pictures by the dozen, and never seeing a farthing of what they
fetched, except in the food which Black Sal provided to keep me alive.
Now and then, in an amiable mood, she would get me a newspaper; and once
I had to illustrate a cheap edition of Cook's _Voyages_, and of course
had the book to go by. But she never let me write to anybody or see
anybody, and mounted guard over me as jealously as if I had been a
veritable goose that laid golden eggs.

"You know the rest. We got turned out when they pulled down the old
place, and took refuge in Driver's Alley, a nice select neighbourhood;
and there you found me, old man."

"Think of being near one another so long," said Jeffreys, "and never
knowing it."

"Ten to one that's exactly what my guardian's daughter is observing to
herself at this moment. I say, Jeff, compared with Driver's Court, this
is a palatial apartment, and you are a great improvement on Black Sal;
but for ah that, don't you look forward to seeing a little
civilisation--to eating with a fork, for instance, and hearing an `h'
aspirated; and--oh, Jeff, it will be heavenly to wear a clean collar!"

Jeffreys laughed.

"Your two years' trouble haven't cast out the spirit of irreverence,
youngster," said he.

"It _is_ jolly to hear myself called youngster," said the boy, in a
parenthesis; "it reminds me of the good old days."

"Before Bolsover?" said Jeffreys sadly.

"Look here! If you go back to that again, and pull any more of those
long faces, Jeff, I'll be angry with you. Wasn't all that affair
perhaps a blessing in t