and made a faint resistance.

"Let me go!" he said with an oath; "let me go!"

But his head fell heavily on his rescuer's shoulder while he spoke, and
when at last he lay on the path he was senseless.

Jeffreys carried him to the shelter of an arch, and there did what he
could to restore animation. It was too dark to see the man's face, but
he could feel his pulse still beating, and presently he gave a sigh and
moved his head.

"What did you do it for?" he said piteously.

Jeffreys started. He knew the voice, hoarse and choked as it was.

"What's your name?" he said, raising the form in his arms and trying to
see the face. "Who are you?"

"I've got no name! Why couldn't you let me be?"

"Isn't your name Trimble--Jonah Trimble?"

The poor fellow lifted his head with a little shriek.

"Oh, don't give me up! Don't have me taken up! Help me!"

"I will help you all I can, Trimble."

"Why, you know me, then?--you're--Who are you?"

"I'm John Jeffreys."

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

AN ANGEL UNAWARES.

In a wretched garret of a house in Storr Alley, near Euston, at the
sick-bed of his old enemy, Jeffreys reached a turning-point in his life.
How he conveyed the half-drowned Jonah on the night of the rescue from
the canal bank to his lodgings he scarcely knew.

The hand of a friend is often near when it is least expected. So Jonah
had found, when he believed all hope and life to be gone; and so
Jeffreys had found, when, with his poor burden in his arms, he met,
beside a barge at daybreak, a dealer in vegetables for whom he had
sometimes worked at Covent Garden, and who now, like a Good Samaritan,
not only gave the two a lift in his cart, but provided Jeffreys with an
opportunity of earning a shilling on the way.

This shilling worked marvels. For both Trimble and Jeffreys were on the
verge of starvation; and without food that night rescue would have been
but a farce.

It was soon evident that Jonah had far more the matter with him than the
mere effects of his immersion. He was a wreck, body and soul. The
dispensary doctor who called to see him gave him a fortnight to live,
and the one or two brave souls who penetrated, on errands of mercy, even
into Storr Alley, marked his hollow cough and sunken cheeks, and knew
that before long one name more would drop out of their lists.

It was slowly, and in fragments only, that Jeffreys heard his story.
Jonah was for ever reproaching him with what had happe