respectability--as if he could not
have borrowed the money from Dr. Bompas in the morning!

"I'll see you blowed," was his muttered reply, and he caught up his bag in
a passion.

"All right, little man! I shouldn't be rude about it," said the dapper
cashier. "If I couldn't pay my shot I should sleep in the Park, on a nice
fine night like this."

"I shall!" shouted Pocket through his teeth, as though that would prevent
the brute of a cashier from sleeping soundly in his bed. And it was his
own idle and childish threat that set him presently wondering what else he
was to do. He had the spirit of adventure, as we have seen.

He had the timorous, or let us say, the imaginative temperament, which
lends to adventure its very salt. He wished to have done dangerous or
heroic things, if not to have to do them. He had so little to boast
about; his brothers, and so many other fellows of his own age, had so
much. It would make a great yarn some day, how he had come up from school
to see a doctor--and slept in the Park!

Meanwhile he had only a vague idea of his way there; he knew hardly
anything of London except St. John's Wood and his present landmark of the
Nelson column and the Landseer lions. He knew them from having stayed
some time (under another doctor) as a child at Shaw's Hotel. But, I say!
What would Bompas say to his sleeping out, and what sort of night could he
expect in the open air?

He had an overcoat. It had been in his way all day; it would come in more
than handy for the night. And it suddenly struck Pocket, with all the
force of a forgotten novelty, that he had a revolver and cartridges as
well.

That decided him. Not that he seriously thought himself the kind of
person to use a revolver with resolution or effect; but it made him feel
doughty and even truculent to find the means of heroic defence all ready
to his hand. He began to plume himself on his providential purchase. He
would sell his young life dearly if he fell among London thieves; in his
death he would not be unhonoured at school or at home. Obituary phrases
of a laudatory type sprang like tears to a mind still healthy enough to
dash them away again, as though they had been real tears; but it was with
all the nervous exaltation of the unsuspected desperado that he inquired
his way of a colossal constable at the corner of Pall Mall and the
Haymarket.

The man wanted to know if he meant Hyde Park Corner. "Yes," said Pocket,
hasti