He thought of the women he met in his own world--women who would have uttered a shriek of horror at the idea of walking in the streets of London at any hour of the day, to say nothing of the night; and here was this poor child walking every night from one end of London to the other, after mental and physical fatigue which would have prostrated those other women for a week. He thought of the extravagance, the exaction, the egotism, which he had seen in the women he met in society; and he asked himself how many among the brightest and best of those he knew were as pure and true as this girl, for whom the present was so hard a slavery, the future so dark an enigma. He left the theatre, and found that the establishment of which she had spoken as “a kind of public-house,” was an actual public-house, and nothing else. He went in at that quieter and more aristocratic portal on which the mystic phrase “Jugs and Bottles” was inscribed; but even here he found a select circle engaged in the consumption of gin-and-bitters. He inquired for Mr. St. Albans--concluding that the gentleman would be best known by his daughter’s professional alias--and the old man speedily emerged from a parlour where some noisy gentlemen were playing bagatelle. The old tutor was not a little disconcerted on beholding Laurence Desmond, and faltered a feeble apology as the two men went out into the street together. “I am obliged to wait somewhere, you see, Desmond,” he said. “I can’t stand Harry Bestow in the farces; and I can’t hang about the green-room; Mortemar doesn’t like it. So I take a glass of bitter ale in there. The Prince of Wales is a regular theatrical house, and one hears all sorts of news about the West-end theatres.” Mr. Desmond wondered that the bitter ale dispensed at the Prince of Wales should perfume the breath of the consumer with so powerful an odour of gin. He gave no expression to this wonder, however, but proceeded to relate what he had done in the green-room. “Yes, very right, very right, Desmond,” said Tristram Alford, rather despondently, when he had heard all. “My little Lucy ought not to act with such a woman as that; and she can go back to Market Deeping for the new year. The journey will be expensive--but----” “You must let me arrange that little matter in my own way,” Laurence said, kindly. “I can promise Miss Alford an engagement at the Pall Mall, in March; and in the meantime you must let me be your banker.” “My dear friend, you are too generous--you are the soul of nobility. But how can I ever repay----” “It is I who am under obligation to you. Can I forget that if you hadn’t made me work up my Thucydides to the highest point of perfection, those stony-hearted examiners would have inevitably ploughed me? And now let us go to the stage-door. Lucy--Miss Alford--must be ready by this time.”