Bob came from his dreams with a jerk, and stared upon Julian with his big brown eyes. Presently he began to realize matters. "Want another doctor, sir? It ain't no manner of good," he remarked airily, beginning to search for his cap, and to glow in the prospect of another cab-ride. "No," said Julian. "I stopped to tell you that you were wrong. The gentleman is quite well again." He put his hand into his pocket and produced half a crown. "There's something for your mistake," he said. Bob took it solemnly, and, as Julian walked on, called after him: "It wasn't my fault, sir; it was father's." He had more desire to shine as an intellectual authority on great matters of dissolution than to respect the departed. Julian could not help smiling at the child's evident discomfiture as he pursued his way towards Grosvenor Place. On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor passers-by, a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting. Her gin-soddened face came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond black bonnet, braided with rags, viciously glittering here and there with the stray bugles which survived from some bygone era of comparative respectability. Her penetrating snores denoted that she was oblivious of the lounging approach of the policeman, whose blue and burly form was visible in the extreme distance. Julian stopped to observe her reflectively. His eye, which loved the grotesque, was pleased by the bedragglement of her attitude, by the flat foot, in its bursting boot, which protruded from the ocean of her mud-stained petticoats, by the wisps of coarse hair wandering in the breeze above her brazen wrinkles. Poor soul! she kept a diary of her deeds, even though she could perhaps only make a mark where her signature should have been. Julian stared at her very intently, and as he did so he started violently, for across the human background which her sleeping dissipation supplied there seemed to float the vague shadow, suggestion, call it what you will, of a tongue of flame.