“I must go out into the wilderness again, my father,” said the young man with the new glamour in his large bright eyes. “It may then be given to me to write in the book.” From this day forth the young man spent his outdoor hours in many and strange places, without pain, without trepidation, without his previous hurry of the spirit. He walked fearlessly among the crowded streets, reading the faces of those he found therein. Sometimes he would go afield and enter the country lanes and the woodland places and read the face of Nature. Under the cover of the darkness his friend Dodson would sometimes tap upon the shutters of the shop. The young man would immediately leave his books, for he had returned to those companions of his early days, and would go forth with his friend into the streets of the great city. On the side of each there was an odd fear: James Dodson would never venture abroad upon these excursions without turning up his coat collar and pulling down his hat over his eyes, and he earnestly besought William Jordan to follow his example. “If it leaks out that we still walk out together,” said Jimmy Dodson, “I am done for socially, and I shall lose my three hundred a year.” On the other hand William Jordan’s constant fear was lest his friend in a moment of unguarded impetuosity should pass through the shop and penetrate over the threshold of the little room. “Jimmy,” he said, with that directness of speech which was his recent possession, “I would urge upon you never to pass beyond the threshold of the little room in which I and my father dwell, until that hour should come wherein you are told to enter.” “I promise, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, assenting readily, “and I ask you not to breathe it to a living soul that we still walk out together. Really I don’t know why we do. I seem to be taking my life in my hand, yet I feel as though I haven’t the power to help myself. The fact is I can’t do without you, Luney.” However, the time was at hand when these evening excursions were much curtailed. In the course of his daily wanderings abroad, the young man in his new and high courage, found himself on one occasion in a dreadful slum in the eastern part of the great city. Once before in the early days of his childhood when, holding the hand of his father, he was wont to go forth to seek knowledge, he had found himself in this dismal place. And such was the terror it aroused in him that his dreams were haunted for many nights. But this day he traversed these regions, which he had never thought to dare to enter again, calmly, fearlessly and alone. And in the middle of the most noisome part of the slum, he observed a stalwart man in a shabby black coat, and a very old hat, and trousers frayed at the end, and ugly and misshapen shoes with their strings hanging loose, talking to two ragged and filthy urchins whose bare legs were plastered with mud, who were revelling in the gutter.