“Early!” cried Mr. Upton. “Haven’t I lost my boy, and wasn’t it these Cockney cads who turned him adrift in London? I ought to have gone to them last night. I wish I had, when my blood was up after your dinner; for I don’t mind telling you now, Mr. Thrush, that in spite of your hospitality I was none too pleased at your anxiety to get rid of me afterwards. It made me feel like doing a little bit for the boy on my own; but I’d called once on my way into town, and only seen a servant then, so I thought I’d make sure of putting salt on somebody by waiting till this morning.” The visitor paused to look harder than ever at Mullins, and Thrush seized the opportunity to offer an apology for his abrupt behaviour in the street. “I confess I showed indecent haste,” said he; “but Mullins and I had our night’s work cut out, and he at any rate has not had his boots off since you saw him.” “Hasn’t he?” cried Mr. Upton, in remorseful recognition of an unsuspected devotion; “then I’ll say what I’ve got to say in front of him, for you’re both my friends, and I’ll unsay all I said just now. Bear with my temper, both of you, if you can, for I feel beside myself about the boy! It was all I could do to keep my hands off that smug little lump of London inhumanity! Kept me waiting while he finished his breakfast, he did, and then came in polishing a hat as sleek as himself, and saying ‘Rather early!’—just as you set me off by saying yourself a minute ago.” “But he seems to have told you something, Mr. Upton?” “Has he not! He began by telling me he was sorry for me, confound him! I could have made him sorrier for himself! He was sorry for me, but what could he do? London was a large place, and ‘we Londoners’ were busy men. I told him so were some of us in the iron-trade, but not too busy to keep an eye on boys who were friends of our boys. He said London life was different; and I said so I could see. They never had spare beds at a moment’s notice, much less for boys who might set fire to the house or—or shoot themselves——” His two hearers uttered a simultaneous exclamation, and Mr. Upton stood glancing piteously from one to the other, as though his lad’s death-warrant were written in their faces. Eugene Thrush, however, looked so genuinely distressed that the less legible handwriting on the face of Mullins also attracted less attention. “Had he anything to shoot himself with?” inquired Thrush, in a curiously gentle voice. Mr. Upton nodded violently as he moistened his lips. “He had, after all!” he croaked. “Little as I dreamt it yesterday, my unhappy boy, who had never to my knowledge pulled a trigger in his life before, was going about London with a loaded revolver in his pocket!” “Had he brought it from school?” asked Thrush, with a covert frown at the transfigured Mullins.