Mr. Egg needed an effort rather of the memory than of the imagination to forecast the recurrence of that familiar stupor. He could see himself leaving the spick-and-span, highly respectable office of the Lyons agency of Messrs. Sculry & Co., and hurrying off upon the few bits of business that must be attended to before he could present himself at “his” wine-shop, which was a very dirty one, indeed, kept by a certain M. and Mme. Louis Morel, in an appropriately unclean back street. There he knew just what to expect in the way of noisy, ready-handed, false-faced welcome. Then would come the tantalizingly-prolonged bargaining over the score to be settled and the score to be begun, and at last he would be free to take possession of that dark, ill-ventilated little back room which was always reserved for the periodical retirements of this regular patron of the house. It was a little room like a ship’s stateroom, hardly large enough to contain its dirty red velvet divan, its round table and its two chairs; yet for a week or a fortnight it would be his, and behind it, in the hallway, was a bed on which he could stretch himself in the hours when he felt the need of deeper slumber than the hard cushions of the divan permitted. There his few friends, outcasts and adventurers like himself, would drop in to see him, one or two at a time, to help him on his murky way with challenges to bouts of brandy-drinking, in which he would always pay for two glasses to the other man’s one. Then, as the procession of callers went on, it would grow dim and dimmer and vague and yet more vague, until it was lost in a hazy, wavering dream, wherein familiar faces of men and women stared at him from out of days so long gone by that in his dream he could fancy them happy. That was what lay before him. Mr. Vincent Egg knew it as well as he knew that the calendar months would go on in their regular order, and the tides in the sea would continue to rise and fall. Under these circumstances, nothing was more certain than that the unfortunate family of Mr. Egg’s washerwoman need look for no help whatever from Mr. Egg’s prospective earnings. “It’s a damned shame!” said Mr. Egg to himself, slapping his thigh. And it was a shame. But there it was. [Illustration] Suddenly a great thought struck Mr. Egg--a thought so great and so forcible in the blow that it dealt his mental apprehension that for three minutes he stood stock-still in the gutter in the middle of the rue des Quatre Mulets. Then somebody poured a pail of water out of a door-way and drowned him out, but he went on his way, quite indifferent to wet feet. Mr. Vincent Egg went to his lodgings, and there extracted from his valise the very small sum of money which he had laid aside for his necessary sustenance on his trip to Lyons. This he took to a sign-painter on the outskirts of Drignan, to whom he paid the whole of it for the execution of a small but conspicuous sign-board, which he carried away with him under his arm.