coughed behind his hand here to indicate apology for
the introduction of a theme so necessarily disagreeable to the other's
feelings--' I was supposed, sir, to have been in your confidence. I made
many applications for employment, and nobody would employ me. Young Mr.
Weatherall, sir, promised, personally, that if I called again, he'd kick
me down the steps.'

Bommaney groaned.

'What do you want with me?' he asked again.

They were standing by this time outside the doors of a public-house, and
the wind-driven rain was pelting down heavily.

'I thought, sir----' said Hornett; 'I'm very hard pressed, sir.' The
dog-like, propitiatory smile never varied. 'I was following Mr. Phil
myself, sir, in the hope that his kindness might run to a trifle.'

'Come in,' said Bommaney; and Hornett eagerly accepting the invitation,
they entered the house together. There was an odour of frying in the
room, and a hissing noise proceeded from a soft of metal caldron which
stood over a row of gas-jets on the pewter counter. A printed legend,
'Sausage and Mashed, 3d.' was pasted on the wooden partition at the
side of the box they entered, and on the mirror which faced them, and
displayed their own squalid misery to themselves. A year ago the fare
would have seemed uninviting to either at his hungriest moment, but now
Bommaney called for it with a dreadful suppressed eagerness, and, the
barman serving them with a tantalising leisure, they watched every
movement with the eyes of famine.

'I've got a little place, sir, of my own,' whispered Hornett, when the
pangs of hunger were appeased. 'It's very humble, but you could put up
for the night there.' Bommaney made no answer, but the two set out again
together through the rain, and, pausing once only for the purchase of a
flat pint bottle of whisky, made straight for Fleeter's Rents.

All that nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand of the many
thousands who pass it every day could tell you of Fleeter's Rents
is that it makes a narrow black gash in the walls of the great
thoroughfare, and that it neighbours Gable Inn. It is slimy in its very
atmosphere all winter through, and its air in summer time is made of
dust and grit and shadow. The old Inn elbows it disdainfully on one
side, and on the other a great modern stuccoed pile overtops it with
a parvenu insolence. It is the home naturally of the very poor; for
no hermit or hater of the world, however disposed to shun his fellows,
would