I soon changed back to my first boarding-house. After my two weeks were out for which I had prepaid, I went to my landlady, Mrs. Starling, a tall, thin woman with high cheek bones, a cold eye and a close mouth, and told her frankly I could not pay any more in advance, and that, though I would certainly pay her within a short time, it might not be convenient for me to pay her by the week, and I left it with her whether she would keep me on these terms. She did not hesitate a second. Her first duty was to herself and family, she said, by which she meant her daughter, "Miss Starling," as she always spoke of her, but whom the irreverent portion of the boarders whom I associated with always spoke of as "Birdy," a young woman who dressed much in yellow, perhaps because it matched her blondined hair, played vehemently on the piano, and entertained the young men who boarded there. "Besides, she wanted the room for a dressing-room for a gentleman who wished a whole suite," she added, with what I thought a little undue stress on the word "gentleman," as the "gentleman" in question was the person who had borrowed my money from me and never returned it: Count Pushkin, who occupied the big room next my little one. He had, as I learned, cut quite a dash in town for a while, living at one of the most fashionable hotels, and driving a cart and tandem, and paying assiduous attention to a young heiress in the city, daughter of a manufacturer and street-car magnate; but latterly he had taken a room at Mrs. Starling's, "in order," he gave out, "that he might be quiet for a time," as a duke or duchess or something—I am not sure he did not say a king—who was his relative, had died in Europe. He had taken the greater part of the boarding-house by storm, for he was a tall, showy-looking fellow, and would have been handsome but for a hard and shifty eye. And I found myself in a pitiful minority in my aversion to him, which, however, after a while, gained some recruits among the young men, one of them, my young reporter, Kalender, who had moved there from Mrs. Kale's.

The boarding-house keeper's daughter was desperately in love with Pushkin, and, with her mother's able assistance, was making a dead set for him, which partiality the count was using for what it was worth, hardly attempting meantime to disguise his amusement at them. He sang enough to be passable, though his voice was, like his eye, hard and cold; and he used to sing duets with Miss Starling: the method by which, according to a vivacious young Jew, named Isadore Ringarten, who lived in the house, he paid his board. I never knew how he acquired his information, but he was positive.

"I vish," said Isadore, "I could pay my board in vind—vith a little song. Now, I can sing so the Count he would give me all he is vorth to sing so like I sing; but I am not a count—efen on this side."

However this was, Pushkin paid the girl enough attention to turn the poor thing's head, and made her treat harshly my reporter, Kalender, who was deeply in love with her, and spent all his salary on her for flowers, and lavished theatre tickets on her.

The evening before I left I had to call Pushkin down, who had been drinking a little, and I must say, when I called, he came promptly. It was after dinner in "the smoking room," as the apartment was called, and he began to ridicule poor Victoria cruelly, saying she had told him her hair was yellow like that of the girls of his own country, and he had told her, no, that hers was natural, while theirs was always dyed, and she swallowed it.

"She is in loaf mit me. She swallow whatefer I gif her—" he laughed. The others laughed, too. But I did not. I thought of Lilian Poole and Peck. Perhaps, I was thinking of my money, and I know I thought of the account of the ball which took place the day I arrived. I told him what I thought of his ridiculing a girl he flattered so to her face. He turned on me, his eyes snapping, his face flushed, but his manner cool and his voice level.

"Ha-ah! Are you in loaf mit her, too, like poor Kalender, who spent all hees moneys on her, and what she laugh at to make me amused? I gif her to you, den. I too not want her—I haf had her, you can take her."

He made a gesture as if tossing something contemptuously into my arms, and put his cigarette back in his teeth and drew a long breath. There were none but men present, and some of them had stopped laughing and were looking grave.

"No, I am not in love with her," I said quietly, standing up. "I only will not allow you to speak so of any lady in my presence—that is all." I was thinking of a girl who lived in a sunny house, and had once taken a lot of little dirty-faced children to feed them, and once had smiled into my eyes. I only knew her name, but her violets were in my pocket near my heart. I was perfectly calm in my manner and my face had whitened, and he mistook it, for he blurted out:

"Oh! I vill nod? I vill nod speaks in your presence. You vill gif me one little lesson? You who know te vorl so vell. I tank you, Millot!"

He bowed low before me, spreading out his arms, and some of the others tittered. It encouraged him and he straightened up and stepped in front of me.

"I vill tell you vat I vill does," he proceeded. "I vill say vat I tam please before you about anybodies." He paused and cast about for something which would prove his boast. "Tere is nod a woman in tis town or in America, py tam! that vill nod gif herself to fon title—to me if I hax her, and say, 'tank you, Count.' Ha, ah?" He bent his body forward and stuck his face almost into mine with a gesture as insulting as he could make it, and as I stepped back a pace to get a firm stand, he stuck out his tongue and wagged his head in derision. The next second he had turned almost a somersault. I had taken boxing lessons since Wolffert thrashed me. I saw the bottom of his boots. He was at precisely the right distance for me and I caught him fairly in the mouth. His head struck the floor and he lay so still that for a few moments I thought I had killed him. But after a little he came to and began to rise.

"Get up," I said, "and apologize to these gentlemen and to me." I caught him and dragged him to his feet and faced him around.

"You haf insulted me. I vill see about tis," he spluttered, turning away. But I caught him with a grip on his shoulder and steadied him. The others were all on my side now; but I did not see them, I saw only him.

"Apologize, or I will fling you out of the window." He apologized.

The affair passed. The Count explained his bruises by some story that he had been run down by a bicycle, to which I learned he afterward added a little fiction about having stopped a runaway and having saved some one. But I had left before this little touch occurred to him. Mrs. Starling must have had some idea of the collision, though not of the original cause; for she was very decided in the expression of her wishes to have possession of "the dressing room" that night for the "gentleman," and I yielded possession.

The curious thing about it was that one reason I could not pay Mrs. Starling again in advance was that he still had my money which he had borrowed the day after I had arrived.

From Mrs. Starling's I went back to my old boarding-house, kept by Mrs. Kale, as a much cheaper one, in a much poorer neighborhood, where I was not asked to pay in advance, but paid at the end of the month by pawning my scarf-pins and shirt studs, and gradually everything else I had.

I was brought up to go to church, my people having all been earnest Christians and devoted church people; but in my college years I had gone through the usual conceited phase of callow agnosticism; and partly from this intellectual juvenile disease and partly from self-indulgence, I had allowed the habit to drop into desuetude, and later, during my first years at the bar, I had been gradually dropping it altogether. My conscience, however, was never quite easy about it. My mother used to say that the promise as to training up a child in the way he should go was not to be fulfilled in youth, but in age, and as my years advanced, I began to find that the training of childhood counted for more and more. Lilian Poole, however, had no more religion than a cat. She wished to be comfortable and to follow the general habit of the feline class to which she belonged. She went to the Episcopal Church because it was fashionable, and whenever she had half an excuse she stayed away from church unless it were on a new-bonnet Sunday, like Easter or some such an occasion, when she made up by the lowness of her genuflexions and the apparent devoutness of her demeanor for all omissions. I must confess that I was very easily influenced by her at that time, and was quite as ready to absent myself from church as she was, though I should have had a much deeper feeling for her if she had not violated what I esteemed a canon of life, that women, at least, should profess religion, and if she had not pretended to have questionings herself as to matters as far beyond her intellect as the Copernican system or Kepler's laws. I remember quoting to her once Dr. Johnson's reply to Boswell, when the latter asked if Poole, the actor, were not an atheist: "Yes, sir, as a dog is an atheist; he has not thought on the matter at all."

"Dr. Samuel Johnson?" she asked. "You mean the one who wrote the Dictionary?" and I saw that she was so pleased with her literary knowledge in knowing his name that she never gave a thought to the matter that we were discussing, so let it drop.

As David said, that in his trouble he called upon the Lord, so now, in my solitude and poverty, I began once more to think on serious things, and when Sunday came I would dress up and go to church, partly in obedience to the feeling I speak of, and partly to be associated with people well dressed and good mannered, or passably so. The church I selected was a large stone edifice, St. ——'s, with a gilded cross on its somewhat stumpy spire, toward which I saw a richly clad congregation wending their way Sunday morning.

The rector, as was stated in gilded letters on a large sign, was the Rev. Dr. Bartholomew Capon. I cannot say that the congregation were especially refined looking or particularly cordial; in fact, they were very far from cordial, and the solemn verger to whom I spoke, after turning a deaf ear to my request for a seat, took occasion, as soon as he had bowed and scraped a richly dressed, stout lady up the aisle, to look me over on the sly, not omitting my shoes, before he allowed me to take a seat in one of the rear pews.

The preacher—"The Rector," as he spoke of himself in the notices, when he occasionally waived the rather frequent first personal pronoun—was a middle-aged gentleman with a florid complexion, a sonorous voice, a comfortable round person, and fair hands of which he was far from ashamed; for he had what, but for my reverence for the cloth, I should call a trick of using his hand with a voluminous, fine cambric handkerchief held loosely in it. His face was self-contained rather than strong, and handsome rather than pleasing. He was so good-looking that it set me on reflecting what relation looks bear to the rectorship of large and fashionable churches; for, as I recalled it, nearly all the rectors of such churches were men of looks, and it came to me that when Sir Roger de Coverley requested his old college friend to send him down a chaplain, he desired him to find out a man rather of plain sense than much learning, of a good aspect, a clear voice, a sociable temper, and, if possible, a man who knew something of backgammon. His sermon was altogether a secondary consideration, for he could always read one of the Bishop of St. Asaph's or Dr. South's or Dr. Tillotson's. Possibly, it is something of the same feeling that subordinates the sermons to the looks of rectors of fashionable churches. However, I did not have long to reflect on that idea, for my thoughts were given a new and permanently different, not to say pleasanter, direction, by the sudden appearance of a trim figure, clad in a gray suit and large gray hat, which, as it moved up the aisle, quite eclipsed for me "the priest and all the people." I was struck, first, by the easy grace with which the young girl moved. But, before she had turned into her pew and I caught sight of her face under the large hat which had hidden it, I knew it was my young lady, Miss Leigh, whom I had helped up on the train and afterward into her carriage. It is not too much to say that the Rev. Dr. Capon secured that moment a new permanent member of his congregation. Before the service was over, however, I had been solemnized by her simple and unaffected devoutness, and when, in one of the chants, I caught a clear liquid note perfectly sweet and birdlike, I felt as though I had made a new and charming discovery.

The rector gave a number of notices from which I felt the church must be one of the great forces of the city for work among the poor, yet, when I glanced around, I could not see a poor person in the pews except myself and two old ladies in rusty black, who had been seated near the door. I was struck by the interest shown in the notices by my young lady of the large hat, from whose shapely little head with its well-coiled brown hair my eyes did not long stray.

"I have," he said, "in addition to the notable work already mentioned, carried on, through my assistant in charge, the work of St. Andrew's chapel with gratifying success. This work has reached, and I am glad to be able to say, is reaching more than ever before, the great ignorant class that swarms in our midst, and exhibits a tendency to unrest that is most disturbing. This is the class which causes most of the uneasiness felt in the minds of the thoughtful."

I observed that he did not mention the name of "the assistant in charge," and my sympathy rather went out to the nameless priest, doing his work without the reward of even being mentioned.

As to the sermon, I can only say that it was twenty minutes long, and appeared aimed exclusively at the sins of Esau (whom I had always esteemed a quite decent sort of fellow), rather than at those of the doctor's congregation, whom he appeared to have a higher opinion of than of the Patriarchs. I recall the text: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you." He made it very plain that to be pious and prudent was the best way to secure wealth. He held up a worldly motive and guaranteed a worldly reward. Such a sermon as that would have eased the most uneasy conscience in Christendom.

When the congregation came out I dawdled in the aisle until my young lady passed, when I feasted my eyes on her face and finely curved cheek, straight nose, and soft eyes veiled under their long lashes. My two old ladies in black were waiting in the end of a pew and, as I observed by their smiles when she approached, waiting like myself to see her. I had already recognized them as the old ladies of the bundles, whom I had once helped on the street. How I envied them the smile and cordial greeting they received in return! I made the observation then, which I have often had confirmed since, that tenderness to the aged, like that to the very young, is the mark of a gentle nature.

I heard them say, "We know who has done the work out at the Chapel," and she replied, "Oh! no, you must not think that. My poor work has been nothing. Your friend has done it all, and I think that the Doctor ought to have said so," to which they assented warmly, and I did the same, though I did not know their friend's name.

As I had nowhere to go in particular, I strolled slowly up the street, and then walked back again. And as I neared the church, I met the rector who had just left his robing-room. He was a fine-looking man on the street as well as in the chancel, and I was prompted to speak to him, and say that I had just heard him preach. He was, however, too impatient at my accosting him and so manifestly suspicious that I quickly regretted my impulse. His, "Well, what is it?" was so prompt on his lips and his suspicion of me was so clear in his cold, bluish eyes, that I drew myself up and replied: "Oh! nothing. I was only going to say that I had just heard you preach—that's all."

"Oh! Ah! Well, I'm much obliged. I'm very glad if I've helped you." He pulled out his watch.

"Helped me! You haven't," I said dryly and turned away.

A quarter of an hour later, as I strolled along the street lonely and forlorn, I saw him hurrying up the steps of the large house which had been pointed out to me as Mrs. Argand's, the great philanthropist.