Harry, however, had never ceased his connection with the _Tiddler_, although it was not one of the things he mentioned to the notorious interviewer who came to patronise him in those days, and to whom he caught his mother showing the parody on Gray's Elegy. _T.T._ had been a good friend to Harry at the foot of the hill, and he was not going to desert just yet, even if he could have afforded to do so. Of the £51 10s. 9d. which he managed to make in the first year, £34 4s. was from the _Tiddler's_ coffers; of the third year's £223 14s. 6d. (a mighty leap from the intermediate year), £55 12s. was from the same genial source. And so we find him towards the end of the fourth year--not quite such a good one as the last--fighting hard to touch the second hundred for the second time, and writing verses in his pyjamas at midnight at the close of a long day's work on an ungrateful book. The flat is no longer that in which Harry Ringrose found his mother; it is a slightly larger one in the same mansions on a higher floor; and instead of Weber's Last Waltz, a lusty youth, who arrived there on the same night as Harry, supplies the unsolicited accompaniment inseparable from life in a flat. Only one room has been gained by the change; but in it sleeps a servant, an old retainer of the family; and the sitting-room is larger, so that there is ample room in it for the rather luxurious desk which Harry has bought himself, and at which we find him seated, his back to the books and his nose in his rhyming dictionary, taking his most trivial task seriously, as was ever his wont, on a warm night in the middle of September. He is a little altered--not much. He is thicker set; the legs in the pyjamas are less lean. His face is older, but still extremely young. He has tried to grow a moustache, but failed, and given it up; and the two blots of whisker show that he has no candid girl friend now; and the blue stubble on his chin means that his mother is away. His black hair inclines to length, not altogether because he thinks it looks interesting, but chiefly because he has been too busy to get it cut. He has not yet affected the _pince-nez_ or the spectacles of the average literary man. But he is smoking at his desk; he will be smoking presently in his bed; and on a small table stand a bottle of whisky and a syphon. Suddenly a ring at the bell. At half-past twelve at night a prolonged tattoo on the little steel drum! Harry was greatly startled, as a man may easily be who is working at night after working all day. Yet he would have been much more startled the September before.