The poet glanced carelessly downwards. "It occurred this morning," he sighed. "To tell you the truth, I had scarcely noticed it. There was a green streak in the sunrise. I hastened----" Harvey Grimm had paused in front of a boot shop. "This place," he said firmly, "will do as well as another." "Why not?" the young man agreed, entering promptly, seating himself upon the nearest vacant chair and holding out his foot. "Something light," he begged. "You will observe that my foot is long and narrow." The shopman withdrew the tattered remnants of shoes and stared in amazement at his prospective customer's bare feet. The latter held out his hand for a cigarette and tapped it against the side of Harvey Grimm's case. "It appears to me," he continued, gazing at his mud-stained feet, "that I came out without socks. The sunrise again. However, it is a deficiency which I perceive that you are in a position to remedy." He selected without embarrassment a pair of socks and shoes, and was perfectly willing to don a tie which they purchased from a small haberdasher's shop at the end of the street. That affair disposed of, however, he became quite firm. "The affair of the chop----," he insisted. "We are there," Harvey Grimm interrupted, leading him to an hotel grill-room. The young man paused before the large, open grid and carefully indicated the chop which he considered suitable for his consumption. He then seated himself opposite his two friends and expressed himself in favour of a mixed vermouth. "A very pleasing encounter, this," he declared, drawing the eightpence from his pocket and looking at it thoughtfully. "May I ask, sir, whether you are acquainted with my poems?" "Not yet," Harvey Grimm confessed. "Your purchase, then, was accidental?" "Entirely," his patron explained. "My friend and I are adventurers. We seek the unusual. The appearance of the shop where we met you attracted us. The young lady to whom we addressed some enquiries tendered us a copy of your verses." The young man sighed. "It is a scandalous thing," he said, "to be published in paper covers at eightpence--fourpence to the author. So you are adventurers. You mean by that thieves?" "Sir," Aaron Rodd interrupted, "I am a solicitor." "My ignorance," the young man declared, "is amazing, but that, I presume, is a legalised form of robbery? I am one of the few persons in the world who give value for the money I earn. I produce, create. If only ten thousand people in the city were to pay eightpence for a copy of my works, I should be affluent, as you two are. I should lunch here every day and drink Burgundy." "Then in a very short time," Harvey Grimm reminded him, "you would cease to write poetry." His protégé shook his head.