To foul alleys and rookeries, to cellars and human kennels, to low lodging-houses and tumble-down hovels. The lights of the Blue Pigeons go out one by one, silence steals over the street, and the great crowd of drinkers separates, and each component part of it wends his or her way to some place which is ‘home,’—some place—mean, vile, and awful though it be—which contains the scanty household gods and something near and dear. Although the Blue Pigeons is within a stone’s throw of the Seven Dials, its immediate vicinity is wrapped in silence when the clock strikes one. As a rule the sounds of revelry and riot linger in the narrow streets long after the public has disgorged its prey, and men and women stand about at the street corners, and joke and laugh and quarrel, despite the rough injunction to move on bestowed upon them by the especial policeman told off to superintend their conduct. To-night the rain is so pitiless and the air so keen and merciless that the lowest and meanest of the populace have hurried off to such shelter as they can find. A thick fog, too, has begun to settle down upon the scene of desolation, and it is not a time for the proverbial dog to be out of doors. But there is one customer who still hovers about the closed doors of the “Blue Pigeons.” He had been inside from nine until closing time, and has come out at the last moment with the rest. He had stood about unnoticed among the little groups, shifting about from one to the other, and pretending to belong to them. In the Dials a pot of beer does duty for a good many mouths sometimes, and neither the landlord nor the potman noticed the stranger sufficiently to discover that during the entire evening he had been enjoying the warmth and light and the smell of the spirits and tobacco-smoke without spending one penny for the good of the house. Edward Marston hadn’t anything to spend or he would have spent it. He had made a dive into the house to escape the storm, and it had sheltered him for an hour or two. Now the doors were shut, and he was out in the streets again—homeless! penniless! ‘I’m on my beam ends now, and no mistake,’ he said to himself. ‘What the dickens am I to do? I suppose I’d better go and get quietly into the river.’ He passed his hands over his soaked jacket, looked up at the sky and laughed. ‘I don’t think I need go to the river,’ he muttered; ‘if I stay here a little longer, I can be drowned where I am. I’ll look about for an arch or a gateway; I may as well stand in the dry, if it doesn’t cost any more than this.’ Edward Marston was a gentleman. You saw it in the face under the shapeless billycock hat; you saw it in the thin hands that every now and then wiped the rain-drops from his beard and moustache; you saw it in his bearing as he stepped from the poor shelter of the Blue Pigeons doorway and made a dart round the corner in search of a gateway.