A pale young man in spectacles appeared from a sort of dark cave at the back of the shop, took flowers and ticket, and was swallowed up again in the darkness of the cave. "Oh, thank you!" said Dickie fervently. "I shall live but to repay your bounteous gen'rosity." "None of your cheek," said the pawnbroker, reddening, and there was an awkward pause. "It's not cheek; I meant it," said Dickie at last, speaking very earnestly. "You'll see, some of these days. I read an interesting Nar Rataive about a Lion the King of Beasts and a Mouse, that small and Ty Morous animal, which if you have not heard it I will now Pur seed to relite." "You're a rum little kid, I don't think," said the man. "Where do you learn such talk?" "It's the wye they talk in books," said Dickie, suddenly returning to the language of his aunt. "You bein' a toff I thought you'd unnerstand. My mistike. No 'fense." "Mean to say you can talk like a book when you like, and cut it off short like that?" "I can Con-vers like Lords and Lydies," said Dickie, in the accents of the gutter, "and your noble benefacteriness made me seek to express my feelinks with the best words at me Command." "Fond of books?" "I believe you," said Dickie, and there were no more awkward pauses. When the pale young man came back with something wrapped in a bit of clean rag, he said a whispered word or two to the pawnbroker, who unrolled the rag and looked closely at the rattle. "So it is," he said, "and it's a beauty too, let alone anything else." "Isn't he?" said Dickie, touched by this praise of his treasured Tinkler. "I've got something else here that's got the same crest as your rattle." "Crest?" said Dickie; "isn't that what you wear on your helmet in the heat and press of the Tower Nament?" The pawnbroker explained that crests no longer live exclusively on helmets, but on all sorts of odd things. And the queer little animal, drawn in fine scratches on the side of the rattle, was, it seemed, a crest. "Here, Humphreys," he added, "give it a rub up and bring that seal here." The pale young man did something to Tinkler with some pinky powder and a brush and a wash-leather, while his master fitted together the two halves of a broken white cornelian. "It came out of a seal," he said, "and I don't mind making you a present of it." "Oh!" said Dickie, "you are a real rightern." And he rested his crutch against the counter expressly to clasp his hands in ecstasy as boys in books did. "My young man shall stick it together with cement," the pawnbroker went on, "and put it in a little box. Don't you take it out till to-morrow and it'll be stuck fast. Only don't go trying to seal with it, or the sealing-wax will melt the cement. It'll bring you luck, I shouldn't wonder." (It did; and such luck as the kind pawnbroker never dreamed of. But that comes further on in the story.)