At last came a period when he kept away from our chambers altogether, sending his wife to us instead. Her visits were after dark, usually towards midnight. She called for all sorts of things,--a week's rent, medicine from the druggist in the Strand, Sunday's dinner, her 'bus fare home, once I remember for an umbrella. She was never without an excuse for the emergency that forced her to disturb us, and she was no less fine than he in keeping up the fiction that it was an emergency, and that business prospered though removed from Bond Street into the Unknown. I think it was after this loan of an umbrella that he again came himself, nominally to return it and incidentally to borrow something else. I had not seen him for several months. It might have been years judging from his appearance, and I wished, as I still wish, I had not seen him then. In the Bond Street days he had the air of a man who lived well, and he was correct in dress, "well groomed" as they say. And now? His face was as colourless and emaciated as the faces from which I shrink in the "hunger line" on the Embankment; he wore a brown tweed suit, torn and mended and torn again, with a horrible patch of another colour on one knee that drew my eyes irresistibly to it; his straw hat was as burned and battered as days of tramping in the sun and nights of sleeping in the rain could make it. He was the least embarrassed of the two. In fact, he was not embarrassed at all, but sat in the chair where so often he had faced me in irreproachable frock coat and spotless trousers, and explained as in the old days his wonderful schemes, expressing again the hope that we would second him and, with him, again achieve success. He might have been a prince promising his patronage. And all the while I did not know which way to look, so terrible was his face pinched and drawn with hunger, so eloquent that staring patch on his knee. That was several years ago, and it was the last visit either he or his wife ever made us. I cannot imagine that anything was left to them except greater misery, deeper degradation, and--the merciful end, which I hope came swiftly. It is when I remember the business man and our other friends, fortunately few, who have followed in the same path that I am unable to deny the force of the argument by which J. defends his system. It may be that all our Beggars began life with schemes as wonderful and ideas as large, that their stories are as true, that the line between Tragedy and Farce was never so fine drawn as when, stepping across it, they plunged into the profession of having come down in the world. _The Tenants_ [Illustration: THE LION BREWERY] IX THE TENANTS