Not of course his first effort in that _genre_. Gaveston’s strong sense of collegiate duty had led him to visit the Lads’ Club established by Wallace in the poorer quarter of the dream-enwrought city. And many a rich friendship he had formed with the burly lads in its gymnasium, its strictly undenominational conventicle, and its merry week-end sea-side camps. Not soon could he forget his spiritual wrestling with young Bob Limber, for instance, and how one foggy evening, unable longer to support the mustulent odour of damp clothes and the rough-and-tumble hurly-burly of the indoor football room, he had led the promising youngster out of the Club, and had walked and talked him up and down the ash-strewn towpath beside the stagnant crime-inviting water of the canal, while slimy drops of verdigris guttered on their heads from rusty, disused railway-bridges, and round them slowly fell pieces of plaster peeling from the fissured walls of warehouses obscenely stained with damp and eczematous with decay. For three hours he had striven to convince the obstinate but fascinated youth (a butcher’s apprentice, was he not?) of the high moral value of punting. But the bets which poor Bob made owing to a misunderstanding of Gaveston’s meaning, had been lacking in method and ruinous in result. [Illustration: SPIRITUAL WRESTLING WITH YOUNG BOB LIMBER] Now Gaveston played an even more active part in social reform. Through the murk-bound and desuete alleys of Hoxton, where no policeman (or “copper” as he would ingratiatingly say to the natives) dared venture, Gaveston strolled carolling the popular ditty of the day. He had a way with him, the battered women-folk used to say as he passed them with a kindly wave of his hand. Sometimes as he lay sleepless in the squalider doss-houses, he wondered whether fate might not bring him face to face there with that astonishing woman who, on the pavement outside the Café Régale, had once given him such an astounding glimpse of London’s uttermost underworld. Gaveston was nothing if not thorough. Food that was not Kosher rarely passed those once fastidious lips of his, and unblenchingly he had gone to spend a night in one of Limehouse’s most notorious dope-dens. “Terrible,” the hardened Head of the Hostel had cried, when Gaveston had told him of what he had seen. Not that he had tasted there the papaverous poison--that was a phase whose charms he had long since exhausted: no, on the contrary, he had preached to the degenerate denizens more salutary, more British habits of relaxation. “Muchee lovee opiumee,” the Chinks had protested. But Gaveston was firm. “Dumbee bellee muchee betteree,” he had insisted. The ffoulises were all linguists.