t under the stairs, he was as fresh as Marco himself; and, though
his clothes had been built for a more stalwart body, his recognition of
their cleanliness filled him with pleasure. He wondered if by any
effort he could keep himself clean when he went out into the world
again and had to sleep in any hole the police did not order him out of.

He wanted to see Marco again, but he wanted more to see the tall man
with the soft dark eyes and that queer look of being a swell in spite
of his shabby clothes and the dingy place he lived in. There was
something about him which made you keep on looking at him, and wanting
to know what he was thinking of, and why you felt as if you'd take
orders from him as you'd take orders from your general, if you were a
soldier. He looked, somehow, like a soldier, but as if he were
something more--as if people had taken orders from him all his life,
and always would take orders from him. And yet he had that quiet voice
and those fine, easy movements, and he was not a soldier at all, but
only a poor man who wrote things for papers which did not pay him well
enough to give him and his son a comfortable living. Through all the
time of his seclusion with the battered bath and the soap and water,
The Rat thought of him, and longed to have another look at him and hear
him speak again. He did not see any reason why he should have let him
sleep on his sofa or why he should give him a breakfast before he
turned him out to face the world. It was first-rate of him to do it.
The Rat felt that when he was turned out, after he had had the coffee,
he should want to hang about the neighborhood just on the chance of
seeing him pass by sometimes. He did not know what he was going to do.
The parish officials would by this time have taken his dead father, and
he would not see him again. He did not want to see him again. He had
never seemed like a father. They had never cared anything for each
other. He had only been a wretched outcast whose best hours had been
when he had drunk too much to be violent and brutal. Perhaps, The Rat
thought, he would be driven to going about on his platform on the
pavements and begging, as his father had tried to force him to do.
Could he sell newspapers? What could a crippled lad do unless he
begged or sold papers?

Lazarus was waiting for him in the passage. The Rat held back a little.

"Perhaps they'd rather not eat their breakfast with me," he hesitated.
"I'm not-