N ow, gentlemen, please!’

The landlord of the Blue Pigeons had one eye on the clock and the other on his customers. It wanted only five minutes to closing time, and the patrons of the Blue Pigeons required a great deal of soft persuasion, as a rule, before they shook themselves up from their free-and-easy attitudes at the counter and on the benches, and filed out into the street.

On this especial night there was every excuse for the apparent inattention with which they received the landlord’s hint. Inside it was warm and cheery, the brilliant gas flared upon polished pewter, and gay-coloured glass, through the open door of the bar-parlour the ruddy glare of the fire could be seen dancing on the hearth, and everything was suggestive of warmth and light and comfort.

Outside—oh, what a night it was outside! The rain was coming down in torrents, the streets were seas of slush, and every time the big door swung open to admit a benighted traveller a roaring blast of east wind followed him to give him a final buffet, and seemed to say, ‘Take that; and I’ll give you another when you come out.’

It was no wonder the Blue Pigeons was crammed such a night as this; it was no wonder that once under the hospitable portals, and sheltered from the rain and the wind, the customers hesitated to leave the haven behind them.

‘Now, gentlemen, please!’

This time the landlord put a little more determination into his warning note, and gave the sign to the potman to lower the gas and fidget with the front door.

Reluctantly the gentlemen and ladies drained their glasses, wiped their lips, and shook themselves together preparatory to turning out into the night. Coat-collars were turned up, shawls were flung over battered bonnets, hands were thrust deep into trousers pockets, there was a little laughing, more growling, and a great deal of swearing, mixed with maudlin farewells and some rough horseplay, and then the motley crowd of drinkers oozed through the swing doors, melted gradually, and vanished.

Where to?

To foul alleys and rookeries, to cellars and human kennels, to low lodging-houses and tumble-down hovels.

The lights of the Blue Pigeons go out one by one, silence steals over the street, and the great crowd of drinkers separates, and each component part of it wends his or her way to some place which is ‘home,’—some place—mean, vile, and awful though it be—which contains the scanty household gods and something near and dear.

Although the Blue Pigeons is within a stone’s throw of the Seven Dials, its immediate vicinity is wrapped in silence when the clock strikes one. As a rule the sounds of revelry and riot linger in the narrow streets long after the public has disgorged its prey, and men and women stand about at the street corners, and joke and laugh and quarrel, despite the rough injunction to move on bestowed upon them by the especial policeman told off to superintend their conduct.

To-night the rain is so pitiless and the air so keen and merciless that the lowest and meanest of the populace have hurried off to such shelter as they can find. A thick fog, too, has begun to settle down upon the scene of desolation, and it is not a time for the proverbial dog to be out of doors.

But there is one customer who still hovers about the closed doors of the “Blue Pigeons.”

He had been inside from nine until closing time, and has come out at the last moment with the rest.

He had stood about unnoticed among the little groups, shifting about from one to the other, and pretending to belong to them. In the Dials a pot of beer does duty for a good many mouths sometimes, and neither the landlord nor the potman noticed the stranger sufficiently to discover that during the entire evening he had been enjoying the warmth and light and the smell of the spirits and tobacco-smoke without spending one penny for the good of the house.

Edward Marston hadn’t anything to spend or he would have spent it. He had made a dive into the house to escape the storm, and it had sheltered him for an hour or two. Now the doors were shut, and he was out in the streets again—homeless! penniless!

‘I’m on my beam ends now, and no mistake,’ he said to himself. ‘What the dickens am I to do? I suppose I’d better go and get quietly into the river.’

He passed his hands over his soaked jacket, looked up at the sky and laughed.

‘I don’t think I need go to the river,’ he muttered; ‘if I stay here a little longer, I can be drowned where I am. I’ll look about for an arch or a gateway; I may as well stand in the dry, if it doesn’t cost any more than this.’

Edward Marston was a gentleman. You saw it in the face under the shapeless billycock hat; you saw it in the thin hands that every now and then wiped the rain-drops from his beard and moustache; you saw it in his bearing as he stepped from the poor shelter of the Blue Pigeons doorway and made a dart round the corner in search of a gateway.

He was evidently accustomed to something very like his present position, and there was nothing startlingly new to him in the utter emptiness of his pockets; but it was the first time he had been homeless.

He had been in America for some years, having left his native land in a hurry. He had returned a few weeks since, almost penniless, and tried in vain to drift into some means of gaining a livelihood. Every avenue was closed against him, for his past life was a sealed book, and he had no one to speak a good word for him. So he had hung on to existence till his last copper was spent, and now he was without even a shelter for the night.

He had been turned out of his lodging that morning, and everything he had had been detained for the four weeks’ rent which he had promised again and again, and which he had never been able to pay.

A few papers had been all that he had been allowed to secure from his scanty belongings, and these only because they were of no value to any one but himself.

As he hurried round the corner in search of a convenient gateway in which to spend the night, he drew his hands out of his trousers pockets to shake from the brim of his hat a small pool of water which had begun to trickle down his neck. He drew the lining of his pocket up at the same time, and a piece of folded paper fell on the ground. He picked it up, opened it, and read it.

It was an old acceptance, torn with lying long in folds and dirty with being carried about.

‘Birnie’s acceptance for £500,’ said Marston, as he read it over. ‘Ten years old, and not worth the paper it’s written on. I wonder how that got in my trousers pocket, instead of being with the other papers! I must have put it in in the hurry. I wonder whether Birnie’s alive or dead! If he’s alive, I hope he’s as badly off as I am—curse him!’

He folded the old acceptance carefully, and put it back in his pocket.

‘Birnie owed me more than this when I left England. By Jove, if I had the thousandth part of it now I should be happy. I could get out of this confounded rain and lie quiet a bit. I wonder what’s become of the old set—if they’ve all gone to the dogs, like I have! Egerton was a queer fish, but he had rich relations. Ralph must have left a lot of money behind him, and Gurth Egerton would have some of it by hook or by crook. I wonder what the upshot of that affair was.

Walking along and thinking, with his eyes on the streaming streets, he was suddenly aroused from his reverie by a vigorous ‘Hi, my man!’

A carriage, evidently a doctor’s brougham, was drawn up in the middle of the roadway, and a gentleman was leaning out of the carriage window, and shouting at him to arrest his attention.

‘Hi, my man!’ said the gentleman, peering through the fog, as Marston looked up, ‘can you tell me which is Little Queer Street about here? This fog makes all the streets look alike.’

‘No, I can’t,’ answered Marston; ‘I’m a stranger myself.’

‘Well, Would you mind looking for me? My coachman can’t see the names written up at the corners from the road, and I can’t tramp up and down the neighbourhood in the rain—I should get wet.’

‘What about me?’ asked Marston, with an offended tone in his voice.

The occupant of the carriage gave a short little laugh.

‘My good friend, I don’t think a little more rain will do you much harm; you don’t appear to have been under an umbrella lately.’

Marston remembered that he was a penniless outcast, soaked to the skin; for the moment he had forgotten it, and fancied he was a gentleman walking home.

‘What do you want me to look for?’ he said, altering his tone.

‘Little Queer Street, No. 15; and if you find it I’ll give you a shilling.’

Marston walked up one side street and down another, peering through the fog towards those wonderful arrangements in white and black with which the Board of Works are good enough to label the street corners, and which are so high up and so small that an ordinary-sighted person requires a ladder and a magnifying glass before he can tell what they are, and at night even this would be insufficient unless accompanied by an electric light.

After much wandering up and down, and straining of the eyeballs and cross-examination of a solitary policeman, who was standing up out of the wet, and enjoying a quiet pipe down a particularly deserted side street, Marston discovered where Little Queer Street was, and ascertained which side of the way and which end was honoured by the presence of that No. 15, which was evidently about to be visited by a gentleman who kept his carriage.

He came back with the intelligence, and communicated it to the coachman.

‘Wait a minute, Cook, I haven’t rewarded this poor fellow for his trouble,’ said the doctor, for the coachman was whipping up the horses, without waiting for such a trifle.

The doctor fumbled first in his trousers pockets, then in his waistcoat, and then in his overcoat.

‘Cook,’ he exclaimed, presently, ‘have you got a shilling?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Dear me, how very peculiar! no more have I. My good man I’m very sorry—most extraordinary thing—but I’ve come out without any money. Here, however, is my card. Call to-morrow and I will leave a shilling with the servant for you. Drive on, Cook.’

Cook, the coachman, whipped up his horses and shot off, splashing Marston with mud, and leaving him crestfallen and disappointed in the middle of the road, with a card in his hand.

‘My luck!’ he said, as the light of the carriage vanished in the mist; ‘my infernal luck! That shilling would have been a bed and breakfast. I earned that shilling, and I never wanted it more in my life. What the dickens does a two-horse doctor do here, I wonder! I thought he was sent by Providence to give me a shilling, at first. Bah! Providence turned me up long ago. Let’s look at the card.’

He came out of the roadway, and stood under a lamp-post to read the name of his debtor.

The light flickered and blew to and fro in the night air, and the rain, driven against the glass, made a mist through which the rays fell feebly. But feebly as they fell on the small piece of pasteboard and the face of the man who read it, they showed the sudden gleam of joy that flashed into his white damp face.

For a moment he stood speechless as one dazed; then he read the card aloud, to make sure that he was not dreaming:

‘Dr. Oliver Birnie,

‘The Lodge,

‘Lilac Tree Road,

‘St. John’s Wood.’

‘Oliver Birnie!’ he exclaimed, triumphantly. ‘And keeps a carriage and pair! By Jove! Providence has not deserted me. I’m glad I didn’t recognise him in the dim light of carriage lamps, or I should have cried out and betrayed myself. I can do better by waiting, perhaps. Ah, Mr. Oliver Birnie! it isn’t a shilling I’ve earned to-night—it’s many and many a golden pound. I’ve one bird safe, at any rate. Now I’ve only Gurth Egerton to find. If he’s gone up in the world too, you are all right for a little while, Ned Marston.’