take your lover's hand, traitress, and think to
find protection there. But in your heart I read your fear. The day shall
come when you shall kneel at my feet for mercy, and there shall be no
mercy. Gentlemen, my sword. I am at your service."

CHAPTER XI

A MEETING OF THE ORDER

A man in a fur-lined overcoat--thin, shrunken, and worn--stood on the
pavement in a little street in Camberwell, looking about him in evident
disgust. Before him stretched a long row of six-roomed houses,
smoke-begrimed, hideously similar, hideously commonplace. The street was
empty save for the four-wheeled cab from which he had just alighted, and
which was now vanishing in a slight fog, a milkman and a greengrocer's
boy in amicable converse, and a few dirty children playing in the
gutter. Nothing could be more depressing, or more calculated to
unfavorably impress a stranger from a southern land visiting the great
city for the first time. It was a picture of suburban desolation, the
home of poverty-stricken philistinism, uncaring and uncared for. In
Swinburne's words, though with a different meaning, one saw there,
without the necessity of further travel, "a land that was lonelier than
ruin."

The little old man who had alighted from the cab, stood for a moment or
two looking helplessly around, half surprised at what he saw, half
disgusted. Such monotonous and undeviating ugliness was a thing which he
had never dreamed of--certainly he had never encountered anything like
it. Was it possible that he had made a mistake in the address? He drew a
scrap of paper from his pocket and consulted it again. The address was
written there plainly enough--85, Eden Street, Camberwell. He was
certainly in Eden Street, Camberwell, and the figures on the gate-post
opposite him, worn and black with dirt, were unmistakably an eight and a
five. With a little shudder he pushed open the gate, and walked through
the narrow strip of untidy garden to the front door. The bell he found
broken and useless, so he knocked softly at first, and then louder
against the worn panels.

It was some time before an answer came. Several of the neighbors
appeared upon their doorsteps, and took bold and somewhat ribald stock
of the visitor. A young person of eighty-one, who was considered the wit
of the neighborhood, made several very audible remarks, which produced a
chorus of gigglings, on the subject of his clothes and foreign
appearance. But he stood there as though he