t; "she's coming tomorrow!" and, leaving his
neglected breakfast, he started out to walk off his emotion. His square
ran into one of those slums that still rub shoulders with the most
distinguished situations, and in it he came upon a little crowd
assembled round a dogfight. One of the dogs was being mauled, but the
day was muddy, and Shelton, like any well-bred Englishman, had a horror
of making himself conspicuous even in a decent cause; he looked for
a policeman. One was standing by, to see fair play, and Shelton made
appeal to him. The official suggested that he should not have brought
out a fighting dog, and advised him to throw cold water over them.

"It is n 't my dog," said Shelton.

"Then I should let 'em be," remarked the policeman with evident
surprise.

Shelton appealed indefinitely to the lower orders. The lower orders,
however, were afraid of being bitten.

"I would n't meddle with that there job if I was you," said one.

"Nasty breed o' dawg is that."

He was therefore obliged to cast away respectability, spoil his trousers
and his gloves, break his umbrella, drop his hat in the mud, and
separate the dogs. At the conclusion of the "job," the lower orders said
to him in a rather shamefaced spanner:

"Well, I never thought you'd have managed that, sir"; but, like all men
of inaction, Shelton after action was more dangerous.

"D----n it!" he said, "one can't let a dog be killed"; and he marched
off, towing the injured dog with his pocket-handkerchief, and looking
scornfully at harmless passers-by. Having satisfied for once the
smouldering fires within him, he felt entitled to hold a low opinion of
these men in the street. "The brutes," he thought, "won't stir a finger
to save a poor dumb creature, and as for policemen--" But, growing
cooler, he began to see that people weighted down by "honest toil" could
not afford to tear their trousers or get a bitten hand, and that even
the policeman, though he had looked so like a demi-god, was absolutely
made of flesh and blood. He took the dog home, and, sending for a vet.,
had him sewn up.

He was already tortured by the doubt whether or no he might venture to
meet Antonia at the station, and, after sending his servant with the dog
to the address marked on its collar, he formed the resolve to go and see
his mother, with some vague notion that she might help him to decide.
She lived in Kensington, and, crossing the Brompton Road, he was soon
amongst that ma