A policeman strolled along the street, with an echoing tread, and as the two slunk past him he turned a casual glance upon them. The glance touched them like a galvanic shock, and they would have run if they had had courage for such an indiscretion. ‘What do you want with me?’ asked Bommaney, when the policeman was out of sight and hearing; Hornett walking beside him, with his lean, propitiatory fingers at his chin, looked up with hesitating meekness. ‘Well, you see, sir,’ he responded, ‘your fall was mine, sir; I was supposed’--he coughed behind his hand here to indicate apology for the introduction of a theme so necessarily disagreeable to the other’s feelings--’ I was supposed, sir, to have been in your confidence. I made many applications for employment, and nobody would employ me. Young Mr. Weatherall, sir, promised, personally, that if I called again, he’d kick me down the steps.’ Bommaney groaned. ‘What do you want with me?’ he asked again. They were standing by this time outside the doors of a public-house, and the wind-driven rain was pelting down heavily. ‘I thought, sir----’ said Hornett; ‘I’m very hard pressed, sir.’ The dog-like, propitiatory smile never varied. ‘I was following Mr. Phil myself, sir, in the hope that his kindness might run to a trifle.’ ‘Come in,’ said Bommaney; and Hornett eagerly accepting the invitation, they entered the house together. There was an odour of frying in the room, and a hissing noise proceeded from a soft of metal caldron which stood over a row of gas-jets on the pewter counter. A printed legend, ‘Sausage and Mashed, 3d.’ was pasted on the wooden partition at the side of the box they entered, and on the mirror which faced them, and displayed their own squalid misery to themselves. A year ago the fare would have seemed uninviting to either at his hungriest moment, but now Bommaney called for it with a dreadful suppressed eagerness, and, the barman serving them with a tantalising leisure, they watched every movement with the eyes of famine. ‘I’ve got a little place, sir, of my own,’ whispered Hornett, when the pangs of hunger were appeased. ‘It’s very humble, but you could put up for the night there.’ Bommaney made no answer, but the two set out again together through the rain, and, pausing once only for the purchase of a flat pint bottle of whisky, made straight for Fleeter’s Rents.