On the first occasion that John was driven to such dealing, he passed that guilty side entrance many times before he finally summoned courage to enter. Every time that he essayed the fatal step, the street became full of people whom he knew. There was that editor who was considering his last short story! He turned swiftly, his heel a sudden pivot, and scrutinised the objects in the jeweller’s window, then harried away up the street, as though he were ashamed of wasting his time. A glance over the shoulder, satisfied him that the editor was out of sight and back he slowly came. This time he had got within a foot of the door--a foot of it. One step more and he would have been in the sheltering seclusion of that narrow little passage! There was the girl who sold him stamps in the post-office--the girl who smiled at him and said she had read a beautiful story of his in one of the magazines! He had looked up quickly as though he had mistaken the number on the door, then marched into the next shop on the left, as if that were the one he had been looking for. When he had got in, he realised that it was a butcher’s. The butcher, in a blithe voice, had said: "And what this morning, sir?" "I want--can you tell me the time?" said John. In about half an hour there came a moment when the street was empty. John had seized it and vanished up the little passage. But the ordeal was not over then. He had had to face the high priest of poverty--to tell to him the unforgivable, the mortal crime of penury. And there had been someone in the next confessional--someone hardened in sin--who could hear every single word that he said, and even so far over-stepped the bounds of decency as to look round the corner of their partition. "How much will you give me for this?" said John, laying his watch upon the counter. It was the watch his mother had given him, the watch for which she had lovingly stinted herself of ten pounds in order to mark, with degree, his twenty-first birthday. The high priest had picked it up superciliously. "D’you want to sell it?" "No--oh, no! Only--pawn it." "Well, how much d’you want?" "I’d rather you said," replied John meekly. The high priest shrugged his shoulders. It was a wasting of his time, he said, to go on with nonsense like that. "How much do you want?" he repeated. "Five pounds," said John, and suddenly, without knowing how, found the watch back again in his possession. The high priest had turned to the hardened sinner in the next confessional, and he was left there looking at it blankly in the palm of his open hand. He scarcely knew how he had come by it again. In the midst of the other transaction, the pawnbroker presently addressed him over his shoulder--loudly, so that all in the shop could hear: "I’ll give you two pounds," he had said--"And that’s about as much as I could sell it for myself."