at each, and spending the proceeds with such freedom as to
evoke a protest from his guest.

"I want to impress you," Kelly had retorted. "I want to show you how
well I've done. I always do the same when I get hold of any of you
fellows from out there. Yet," he paused and looked at the other keenly,
"you're such a queer beggar, that I don't suppose you are impressed. I
needn't have tried it on you, after all," but, none the less, he had
declined to let his companion go, and it had been past three when a
sleepy night porter admitted Jimmy to the hotel, Kelly having declared
his intention of taking a room at the club they had visited last.

Jimmy drew up his blind to find the sun shining in a cloudless sky, and
his spirits went up at once. As a result of the deluge of the night
before, London looked almost clean and bright, and he began to wonder
at his depression of the previous evening. After all, it was very good
to be home again, and, thanks to Kelly, he had already made a small
start, which might lead to much bigger things. Kelly, himself, had
arrived in England with nothing, an unknown man.

From Kelly, his mind worked backwards to the girl he had seen enter the
cab. It was curious how her face seemed fixed in his memory. The thought
of her, and of her possible story, worried him all the time he was
shaving, and he found himself wishing he had never noticed her. Somehow,
he did not like the look of her companion, who seemed to treat her with
a very perfunctory sort of courtesy, verging on familiarity, or even
contempt. He was still thinking of her when he went down to breakfast;
but the sight of a copy of the _Record_, the first real English daily he
had seen for many years, a paper, moreover, which wanted him to write
for it, changed the current of his thoughts, and he forgot all about the
girl.

Dodgson had told him there was no hurry for the article, any time within
the next week or so would do, and he, himself, knew that it would be
impossible to write in the dreary atmosphere of the hotel; so he decided
to go down to the City and call on his brother, Walter. There was no
one else he wanted to see in town. All his former acquaintances had
dropped clean out of his life, or, rather, he had dropped out of theirs;
and, probably, he could not have found one of them, even had he wished
to do so, which was not the case. He was a very lonely man, he told
himself; and yet he did not feel bitter about that fact as he h