raight and narrow way of self-sacrificing were indeed a
sin. After all, it had been a very good dinner, and a man would be
unwise to be influenced by a boy's argument. The Reverend "Jimmy" was a
thousand miles from being a hypocrite, as his life's work showed, and
this matter of the dinner really troubled him exceedingly. How many of
his parishioners could have been fed for such an expenditure? On the
other hand, city companies did a very great deal of good, and it would
be churlish to object to their members dining together two or three
times a year. In the end, he blamed the lad, Alban, for putting such
thoughts into his head.

"The fellow's off to sleep in Hyde Park, I suppose," he said to himself,
"or in one of his pirate's caves. What a story he could write if he had
the talent. What a freak of chance which set him down here amongst
us--well born and educated and yet as much a prisoner as the poorest.
Some day we shall hear of him--I am convinced of it. We shall hear of
Alban Kennedy and claim his acquaintance as wise people do when a man
has made a success."

He carried the thought home with him, but laid it aside when he entered
the clergy house, dark and stony and cheerless at such an hour. Alban
was just halfway down the Strand by that time and debating whether he
should sleep in the "caves," as he called those wonderful subterranean
passages under Pall Mall and the Haymarket, or chance the climate upon a
bench in Hyde Park. A chilly night of April drove him to the former
resolution and he passed on quickly; by the theatres now empty of their
audiences; through Trafalgar Square, where the clubs and the hotels were
still brilliantly lighted; up dark Cockspur Street; through St. James'
Square; and so to an abrupt halt at the door of a great house, open to
the night and dismissing its guests.

Alban despised himself for doing it, but he could never resist the
temptation of staring through the windows of any mansion where a party
happened to be held. The light and life of it all made a sure appeal to
him. He could criticise the figures of beautiful women and remain
ignorant of the impassable abyss between their sphere and his own.
Sometimes, he would try to study the faces thus revealed to him, as in
the focus of a vision, and to say, "That woman is utterly vain," or
again, "There is a doll who has not the sense of an East End flower
girl." In a way he despised their ignorance of life and its terrible
comedies a