So saying, he left the room, and betook himself to his old workshop for an hour or two on his beloved cobbler's bench. He had placed the old house under the care of a widow, whom he permitted to live there rent free, and to have the use of the furniture which remained in the house, and to whom, in addition, he paid a small weekly fee. As he walked along the street, he could not fail to think of what his secretary had just said with reference to her early life. His thoughts were full of pathetic interest. Then she too had been a little homeless one! The fact endeared to him, more than ever, the bright young girl who had come like a stream of sunshine into his life. For to "Cobbler" Horn his young secretary was indeed becoming very dear. It could not be otherwise. She was just filling his life with the gentle and considerate helpfulness which he had often thought would have been afforded to him by his little Marian. And now, it seemed to draw this young girl closer to him still, when he learnt that she had once been homeless and friendless, as he had too much reason to fear that his own little one had become. He had a feeling also that the coincidence therein involved was strange. CHAPTER XXVII. COMING INTO COLLISION WITH THE PROPRIETIES. It is not surprising that, in his new station, "Cobbler" Horn should have committed an occasional breach of etiquette. It was unlikely that he would ever be guilty of real impropriety; but it was inevitable that he should, now and again, set at nought the so-called "proprieties" of fashionable life. In the genuine sense of the word, "Cobbler" Horn was a Christian gentleman; and he would have sustained the character in any position in which he might have been placed. But he had a feeling akin to contempt for the punctilious and conventional squeamishness of polite society. It was, no doubt, largely for this reason that "society" did not receive "the Golden Shoemaker" within its sacred enclosure. Not that it rejected him. He had too much money for that; half his wealth would have procured him the entree to the most select circles. But the attitude he assumed towards the fashionable world rendered impossible his admission to its charmed precincts. He made it evident that he would not, and could not, conform to its customs or observe its rules. The world, indeed, courted him, at first, and would gladly have taken him within its arms. Fashion set to work to woo him, as it would have wooed an ogre possessed of his glittering credentials. But he repelled its advances with an amused indifference verging on contempt.