“Oh, I don’t know. See you talkin’ to one of those fellas oncet. Chap named Pyncheon. Worse than missions and ’vangelists, they are.” “Did you ever think of going there yourself?” “Oh, Lord love ye! I’ve thought of it, yes. But I’ve fought it off. Once ye do that ye’re done for.” “Well, I don’t believe I’m done for—” I began; but he interrupted me coaxingly. “I say, sonny. I’ll go to Greeley’s Slip. Then if you’ve nothin’ else on ’and, you come there, too—and we’ll be fellas together. But don’t—don’t—go to the Down and Out!” As I walked away from him I had his “fellas together” amusingly, and also pathetically, in my heart. Lovey was little better than an outcast. I knew him by no name but that which some pothouse wag had fixed on him derisively. From hints he had dropped I gathered that he had had a wife and daughters somewhere in the world, and intuitively I got the impression that without being a criminal he had been connected with a crime. As to his personal history he had never confided to me any of the details beyond the fact that in his palmy days he had been in a ’at-shop in the Edgware Road. I fancied that at some time or another in his career his relatives in London—like my own in Canada—had made up a lump sum and bidden him begone to the land of reconstruction. There he had become what he was—an outcast. There I was becoming an outcast likewise. We were “fellas together.” I was thirty-one and he was fifty-two. My comparative youth helped me, in that I didn’t look older than my age; but he might easily have been seventy. Having got rid of him, I drifted diagonally across the Park, but with a certain method in the seeming lack of method in taking my direction. Though I had an objective point, I didn’t dare to approach it otherwise than by a roundabout route. It is probable that no gaze but that of the angels was upon me; but to me it seemed as if every glance that roved up and down the Park must spot my aim. For this reason I assumed a manner meant to throw observation off the scent. I loitered to look at young people on horseback or to stare at some specially dashing motor-car. I strolled into by-paths and out of them. I passed under the noses of policemen in gray-blue uniforms and tried to infuse my carriage with the fact which Lovey had emphasized, that I had never yet been pinched. I had never yet, so far as I knew, done anything to warrant pinching; and that I had no intentions beyond those of the ordinary law-abiding citizen was what I hoped my swagger would convey. Though I was shabby, I was not sufficiently so to be unworthy to take the air. The worst that could be said of me was that I was not shabby as the working-man is at liberty to be. Mine was the suspicious, telltale shabbiness of the gentleman—far more damning than the grime and sweat of a chimney-sweep.