off that smug little lump of London
inhumanity! Kept me waiting while he finished his breakfast, he did, and
then came in polishing a hat as sleek as himself, and saying 'Rather
early!'--just as you set me off by saying yourself a minute ago."

"But he seems to have told you something, Mr. Upton?"

"Has he not! He began by telling me he was sorry for me, confound him! I
could have made him sorrier for himself! He was sorry for me, but what
could he do? London was a large place, and 'we Londoners' were busy men.
I told him so were some of us in the iron-trade, but not too busy to keep
an eye on boys who were friends of our boys. He said London life was
different; and I said so I could see. They never had spare beds at a
moment's notice, much less for boys who might set fire to the house or--or
shoot themselves----"

His two hearers uttered a simultaneous exclamation, and Mr. Upton stood
glancing piteously from one to the other, as though his lad's
death-warrant were written in their faces. Eugene Thrush, however, looked
so genuinely distressed that the less legible handwriting on the face of
Mullins also attracted less attention.

"Had he anything to shoot himself with?" inquired Thrush, in a curiously
gentle voice.

Mr. Upton nodded violently as he moistened his lips.

"He had, after all!" he croaked. "Little as I dreamt it yesterday, my
unhappy boy, who had never to my knowledge pulled a trigger in his life
before, was going about London with a loaded revolver in his pocket!"

"Had he brought it from school?" asked Thrush, with a covert frown at the
transfigured Mullins.

Mr. Upton repeated what he had heard through the young Westminsters, with
their father's opinion of pawnbrokers' shops as resorts for young
schoolboys, of young schoolboys who frequented them, and of parents and
guardians who gave them the chance. How the two gentlemen had parted
without fisticuffs became the latest mystery to Eugene Thrush, whose only
comment was that it behoved him all the more to do something to redeem the
capital in the other's eyes.

"Now we know why my poor wife heard a shot!" was the only rejoinder, in a
voice not too broken to make Mullins prick up his ears; it was the first
he had heard about the dream.

"I wouldn't say that, Mr. Upton. We know no more than we knew before.
Yet I will own now," exclaimed Thrush, catching Mullins's bright eye,
"that the coincidence will be tremendous if there's nothing in