ith a thirst which threatened the cup as
well as what it held.

Then he sat down to the table and stared at his reflection in the
teapot.

"God! What a fool I've been," he said. "And what the devil am I to do
now?"

Two or three letters lay beside his plate; he flicked them apart with
his shaking finger. "Bills--bills--bills!" he said. "All bills!"

Unopened, he chucked them one by one into the fire, but stopped at the
last. "A lawyer's fist," he said, regarding the ominously legal-looking
hand-writing. "Someone threatening proceedings again. Let 'em proceed!"

He was about to throw that communication also in the fire, but paused
in the act, and laid it down by his plate again, putting another plate
on the top of it to conceal it from his sight.

He took up the knife, old and worn and sharpened at the point, which
lay by the loaf of bread, and looked at its edge.

"This is how poor old Fleming got out of the scrape," he said. "And
Fleming wasn't in a worse hole than I am."

But he turned the knife upon the bread instead of his own throat, and
having begun with an expression of distaste upon the salt fish, his
appetite arrived with eating, and, that dish disposed of, he attacked
the buttered eggs, and found himself in a fair way to make a good meal.
For, in spite of his intemperate habits, he had an invariably good
appetite--an almost indomitable cheerfulness also. The inability to
take himself and his misfortunes seriously had been at the bottom of
all his failures. With his family history and his temperament he was
foreordained to disaster; but he met it smiling, with the courage which
was more the outcome of indifference than of heroism.

"Which is the way to the workhouse, Polly?" he inquired of the little
lodging-house servant who came to clear the table.

He had filled his pipe and had turned his chair to the fire. His blue
eyes shone as brightly, his red hair was watered as carefully free of
curl, his person was as neat and spruce and daintily cared for as if he
had been the most immaculate of mothers' sons.

Polly, at her first place, and with an unbounded admiration and regard
for the lodger who, if he did make a sight of work splashing about in
his bath, was always free with his shillings and full of his fun,
looked at the young man distrustfully.

"What you got to do wi' th' work'us?" Polly asked resentfully, and
seized the bread under one arm and the remains of the haddock under the
other.

"