om the maid
ushered into the room through this door. He was a small, thin, elderly
man, bowed of figure and shuffling in gait. His coat and large,
low-crowned hat, though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an
indefinable sense of some theological standard, or pretence to such
a standard. His meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet
meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by
the effort to discern anything clearly, might have belonged to any old
village priest grown childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid
books. Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not
altogether unclerical in their suggestion. A poor old man he seemed,
as he stood blinking in the electric light of the strange, warm
apartment--a helpless, worn old creature, inured through long years to
bleak adverse winds, hoping now for nothing better in this world than
present shelter.

"How do you do, Mr. Thorpe," he said, after a moment, with nervous
formality. "This is unexpectedly kind of you, sir."

"Why--not at all!" said Thorpe, shaking him cordially by the hand. "What
have we got houses for, but to put up our old friends? And how are you,
anyway? You've brought your belongings, have you? That's right!" He
glanced into the hall, to make sure that they were being taken upstairs,
and then closed the door. "I suppose you've dined. Take off your hat and
coat! Make yourself at home. That's it--take the big chair, there--so!
And now let's have a look at you. Well, Tavender, my man, you haven't
grown any younger. But I suppose none of us do. And what'll you have to
drink? I take plain water in mine, but there's soda if you prefer it.
And which shall it be--Irish or Scotch?"

Mr. Tavender's countenance revealed the extremity of his surprise and
confusion at the warmth of this welcome. It apparently awed him as well,
for though he shrank into a corner of the huge chair, he painstakingly
abstained from resting his head against its back. Uncovered, this head
gained a certain dignity of effect from the fashion in which the
thin, iron-grey hair, parted in the middle, fell away from the full,
intellectual temples, and curled in meek locks upon his collar. A vague
resemblance to the type of Wesley--or was it Froebel?--might have hinted
itself to the observer's mind.

Thorpe's thoughts, however, were not upon types. "Well"--he said, from
the opposite chair, in his roundest, heartiest voice, when the oth