“I told you not to call me Mister,” said Harry, walking on with perfect coolness and at his ordinary pace. Paolo was half beside himself. “Perhaps you have kill a man,” he cried, “and you stop to set right my English--at such a moment----” “Pooh!” said Harry; he would not have quickened his steps for a fortune. “Don’t you know the beggar is an Englishman? A broken head won’t hurt him. Let’s keep the women in sight, they might get into more trouble.” Paolo followed him, trembling and hurried as they got further off; but the noisy sailors were busy about their fallen comrade, and made no attempt to follow. They were too much startled by the summary proceedings of the stranger, and kept back by a certain sense of justice which seldom fails in such an affray. The little Italian kept close to Harry like a dog, rushing about him, now a little in advance, now a little behind. “He ’ave pick himself up,” he said, looking back. “Dio! how the English understand each other! He is not kill.” “Killed!” cried Harry, contemptuously. “It takes more than that to kill an Englishman, even a beast like that fellow. You may palaver with your own kind, but I know what to do with mine. Come along, Thompson. Where have those women gone?” Here Paolo caught him by the arm, dragging him into the narrow street by which the flying figures had disappeared. One side of it was in almost perfect darkness, while the other was white and brilliant in the moonlight. “You like to know who it was,” he said. “Per Bacco! I know.” “It does not matter to me who it was,” said Harry, “so long as they are safe, that is all I care for. Women have no business to be out so late at night.” At this Paolo nodded his head a great many times in assent. “But that is English too,” he said. “How you are strange! You let a young lady go in the street, and you kill a man, and never think more of it! and the man when he is kill, get up and walk away instead of to avenge himself! You are strange, very strange. I understand you very well, for I am an English too.” After this somewhat startling incident, however, they did not linger long on their way. It had stirred the blood in Harry’s veins and given him the new start he wanted. There is nothing like a new incident for familiarising the mind with any great change in this life. Hitherto he had thought of nothing but his own transmogrification. Now he had something else to think of. He got back to his inn unmolested and uninterrupted, and he found his dreary little room not so dreary when it became a shelter for his fatigue, and a refuge in which to think over the strange excitement of this first new day. CHAPTER III. SETTING OUT IN LIFE.