“You see, I’ve made that girl,” Jimmy would say when she had gone. “I knew those songs would just fit her. She wants more. Give me a bit of paper and pencil, old chap. I’ll dot down another. Why does Harrowsmith keep me tied by the leg like this? I mean to get up next week and toddle down to the halls and hear my songs encored. They give Queenie a middle turn now. They used to put her on at the end, to sing the audience out. I’m a made man. It’s just as well, with all the expenses of this illness. Are you going up Tottenham Court Road to-day? If so, look in and pay the fellow that sixpence owing on the sponge. I’ve never used it. Harrowsmith knocked me off my cold tub. You can’t mistake the shop. It’s nearly opposite Maple’s. I forget the name.” He put on tremendous airs. He was, as he proudly said, a made man. When he got better he was going to write songs at fabulous prices for all the leading music-hall singers. But Queenie La Belle should have them at a reasonable figure. She wasn’t a bad sort. She ought to be grateful to him. He had made her. He kept his money under his pillow with his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers. He said seriously to me: “If you’re a little short, old chap, there’s plenty of money in the bag. I’ve gone through the mill myself. I know what it is to come down to my last half-crown.” He might truthfully have said his last copper. To please him I took five shillings. Queenie came to see him regularly. He put the poor girl through a rigid cross-examination. Did the audience take up her two last lines, as he had intended? Were his songs on the barrel organs? The great ambition of his life had been to hear his songs on the barrel organs. But it was early days. It was just as well that they were not on yet. He wanted to hear them. Wanted to tip every grinder a bob. Queenie had to sing the songs to him; had to do the little kick at the end of each verse, pretend to throw the rose into the auditorium--that was Jimmy’s original trick. “I’d like to come down and hear you to-night at the Royal,” he sighed--and Queenie looked horribly frightened, until I reassured her by a dismal shake of the head. “But Harrowsmith is so particular. He keeps me in bed. Of course that makes a man weak. There’s nothing in the world the matter with me but weakness, through want of exercise.” Queenie put on her tremendous hat, all flyaway lace and wings. She stooped down and kissed him solemnly on his clammy forehead. I thought the big, jolly girl, with her coarse voice and frank tongue, an angel at that moment. Jimmy looked scared and annoyed--suspicious of this unusual gentleness. She blubbered outside the bedroom door, growing purple in her efforts to choke her sobs lest he should hear.