So Aldwyth Westwood had the satisfaction of feeling that round and about her resided, when in town, the fine flower of British rank and fashion. But rank and fashion as yet showed no eagerness to embrace her with effusion. Her friends were few; perhaps the best of them was plain Molly Barter, the nursery governess of her early days, who had stayed on indefinitely as quasi-companion, needlewoman, and general factotum of the house. Miss Barter was a person of the happiest disposition; calm and unimaginative, untroubled by the problems of life; sound, not to say solid, in her views of things in general; unvarying in appetite and modes of expression, and devoted to Aldwyth with a sort of dog-like fidelity. Miss Barter did not understand Aldwyth. There were many things she did not even try to understand. She had never read Voltaire; but to her it seemed, even in those troubled months, that nearly everything was for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. That was by no means the opinion of Aldwyth Westwood. None the less, she found comfort in the mental altitude of the faithful Molly, who feared neither ghosts nor mice, and remained quite unmoved in the presence of a blackbeetle. Miss Barter, through Aldwyth, also made the acquaintance of Billy. To her it seemed not unreasonable that he should be homeless and ragged. Sometimes she asked him, with slight signs of severity, what he had done with his cap, and Billy had to explain that “the chaps”--meaning other boys, two legged and aggressive--had deprived him of that article. The same thing happened whenever a new cap or an old was given to Billy; the “chaps” seemed to think that a “blooming little Halbino” ought to show the colour of his hair. So Billy’s cap was “chucked” over a wall, or down an area, and there was an end of it. Another friend of his--one Joe, a stableman at the mews in Hill Street--told him that it wasn’t respectable to go capless in those parts. But what could a boy do, much as he would have liked to give satisfaction to the stableman, for Joe was good to him. On chilly nights he sometimes allowed the small vagrant to hop into a coach-house or harness-room, and sleep like a little lord in warmth and comfort. In return, Billy allowed Joe to scan the racing tips and learn the latest odds without investing in the purchase of a _Planet_. The coachmen and footmen of the locality were much more haughty. Men of their position knew what was due to it, and had no sympathy with intrusive ragamuffins from the far East. The Mayfair flunkey still lived up to the lofty traditions of “Jeames de la Pluche of Buckley Square”: “He vel became his hagwillets, He cocked his ’at with _such_ an hair; His calves and viskers _was_ such pets, That hall loved Jeames of Buckley Square.”