The meal was soon at an end. Brent had taken only a chop, a bit of bread, and a little tea, but there was nothing left of the wholesale repast which the small but now rather podgy looking youngster opposite him had ordered. Brent said nothing when the boy finally called for the bill, but allowed him to pay it, and smiled when with a grand air the lad handed the waiter a tip of twopence. On reaching the street Brent took a card from his pocket, wrote upon it the address of his lodgings, and giving it to the boy told him to call upon him at two o’ clock the following day. The boy promised. “Don’t fail, now,” Brent added, “for I think I have something for you that you will like better than selling matches.” The boy touched his hat and was gone. Brent felt like himself again. His contact with a little genuine human nature had done him a world of good, and his whim had brought him more pleasure than he remembered having for many a day. “There’s good stuff in that boy,” he reflected, smiling to himself over some of the youngster’s hospitable oddities. “I’ll turn him over to Forbes to-morrow, and have him sent to school, and see what can be made of him.” He sought the solitude of a smoking-room corner at his club, and sat down in a more sanguine spirit to meditate over the problem which never was long absent from his mind. He remained in a brown study, oblivious to his surroundings, for nearly half an hour. Then he suddenly jumped up, left the club house, called a cab, and ten minutes later was at the cable office of the Western Union Telegraph Company in the Royal Exchange. “I want to hire the use of one of your cables for an hour or two this evening,” said he to the man in charge. “Wh-what?” “I want to have a conversation with a gentleman in New York over one of your lines, say between ten and twelve o’clock this evening. Will you arrange it? How long will it take for messages to go back and forth, if I sit by the operator’s side at this end, and my friend is in your New York office?” “I don’t think we can do it, sir. Our superintendent isn’t here, and I never heard of anybody hiring a cable in that way. If everything was clear, short messages would go back and forth very quickly. They would have to be repeated at the cable station in Ireland, again at the other end of the cable in Nova Scotia, and again at Duxbury, if you used that line.” “Of course you can arrange it, if I pay you for it. Let’s see, though; it is only three o’clock in New York now, perhaps it can be done quicker at that end. Give me a form,” and Brent wrote a message to Wharton, asking him to secure the use of a cable at the Western Union office for two hours, between five and seven o’clock New York time (ten and twelve London time), and to post himself at the other end of the wire. The message, the clerk was confident, would be in New York within half an hour. Brent left, and returned to the office just before ten o’clock.