bottom and not unveraciously, of a fantastic, a demoralised

sympathy with her. If misery made strange bedfellows it also made
strange sympathies. It was moreover a part of the abasement of

living with such people that one had to make vulgar retorts, quite
out of one's own tradition of good manners. "Morgan, Morgan, to

what pass have I come for you?" he groaned while Mrs. Moreen
floated voluminously down the sala again to liberate the boy,

wailing as she went that everything was too odious.
Before their young friend was liberated there came a thump at the

door communicating with the staircase, followed by the apparition
of a dripping youth who poked in his head. Pemberton recognised

him as the bearer of a telegram and recognised the telegram as
addressed to himself. Morgan came back as, after glancing at the

signature - that of a relative in London - he was reading the
words: "Found a jolly job for you, engagement to coach opulent

youth on own terms. Come at once." The answer happily was paid
and the messenger waited. Morgan, who had drawn near, waited too

and looked hard at Pemberton; and Pemberton, after a moment, having
met his look, handed him the telegram. It was really by wise looks

- they knew each other so well now - that, while the telegraph-boy,
in his waterproof cape, made a great puddle on the floor, the thing

was settled between them. Pemberton wrote the answer with a pencil
against the frescoed wall, and the messengerdeparted. When he had

gone the young man explained himself.
"I'll make a tremendouscharge; I'll earn a lot of money in a short

time, and we'll live on it."
"Well, I hope the opulent youth will be a dismal dunce - he

probably will - " Morgan parenthesised - "and keep you a long time
a-hammering of it in."

"Of course the longer he keeps me the more we shall have for our
old age."

"But suppose THEY don't pay you!" Morgan awfully suggested.
"Oh there are not two such - !" But Pemberton pulled up; he had

been on the point of using too invidious a term. Instead of this
he said "Two such fatalities."

Morgan flushed - the tears came to his eyes. "Dites toujours two
such rascally crews!" Then in a different tone he added: "Happy

opulent youth!"
"Not if he's a dismal dunce."

"Oh they're happier then. But you can't have everything, can you?"
the boy smiled.

Pemberton held him fast, hands on his shoulders - he had never
loved him so. "What will become of you, what will you do?" He

thought of Mrs. Moreen, desperate for sixty francs.
"I shall become an homme fait." And then as if he recognised all

the bearings of Pemberton's allusion: "I shall get on with them
better when you're not here."

"Ah don't say that - it sounds as if I set you against them!"
"You do - the sight of you. It's all right; you know what I mean.

I shall be beautiful. I'll take their affairs in hand; I'll marry
my sisters."

"You'll marry yourself!" joked Pemberton; as high, rather tense
pleasantry would evidently be the right, or the safest, tone for

their separation.
It was, however, not purely in this strain that Morgan suddenly

asked: "But I say - how will you get to your jolly job? You'll
have to telegraph to the opulent youth for money to come on."

Pemberton bethought himself. "They won't like that, will they?"
"Oh look out for them!"

Then Pemberton brought out his remedy. "I'll go to the American
Consul; I'll borrow some money of him - just for the few days, on

the strength of the telegram."
Morgan was hilarious. "Show him the telegram - then collar the

money and stay!"
Pemberton entered into the joke sufficiently to reply that for

Morgan he was really capable of that; but the boy, growing more
serious, and to prove he hadn't meant what he said, not only

hurried him off to the Consulate - since he was to start that
evening, as he had wired to his friend - but made sure of their

affair by going with him. They splashed through the tortuous
perforations and over the humpbacked bridges, and they passed

through the Piazza, where they saw Mr. Moreen and Ulick go into a
jeweller's shop. The Consul proved accommodating - Pemberton said

it wasn't the letter, but Morgan's grand air - and on their way
back they went into Saint Mark's for a hushed ten minutes. Later

they took up and kept up the fun of it to the very end; and it
seemed to Pemberton a part of that fun that Mrs. Moreen, who was

very angry when he had announced her his intention, should charge
him, grotesquely and vulgarly and in reference to the loan she had

vainly endeavoured to effect, with bolting lest they should "get
something out" of him. On the other hand he had to do Mr. Moreen

and Ulick the justice to recognise that when on coming in they
heard the cruel news they took it like perfect men of the world.

CHAPTER VIIII
When he got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in

hand for Balliol, he found himself unable to say if this aspirant
had really such poor parts or if the appearance were only begotten

of his own long association with an intensely living little mind.
From Morgan he heard half a dozen times: the boy wrote charming

young letters, a patchwork of tongues, with indulgent postscripts
in the family Volapuk and, in little squares and rounds and

crannies of the text, the drollest illustrations - letters that he
was divided between the impulse to show his present charge as a

vain, a wasted incentive, and the sense of something in them that
publicity would profane. The opulent youth went up in due course

and failed to pass; but it seemed to add to the presumption that
brilliancy was not expected of him all at once that his parents,

condoning the lapse, which they good-naturedly treated as little as
possible as if it were Pemberton's, should have sounded the rally

again, begged the young coach to renew the siege.
The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs. Moreen three

louis, and he sent her a post-office order even for a larger
amount. In return for this favour he received a frantic scribbled

line from her: "Implore you to come back instantly" target="_blank" title="ad.立即，立刻">instantly - Morgan dread
fully ill." They were on there rebound, once more in Paris - often

as Pemberton had seen them depressed he had never seen them crushed
- and communication was therefore rapid. He wrote to the boy to

ascertain the state of his health, but awaited the answer in vain.
He accordingly, after three days, took an abrupt leave of the

opulent youth and, crossing the Channel, alighted at the small
hotel, in the quarter of the Champs Elysees, of which Mrs. Moreen

had given him the address. A deep if dumb dissatisfaction with
this lady and her companions bore him company: they couldn't be

vulgarly honest, but they could live at hotels, in velvety
entresols, amid a smell of burnt pastilles, surrounded by the most

expensive city in Europe. When he had left them in Venice it was
with an irrepressible suspicion that something was going to happen;

but the only thing that could have taken place was again their
masterly retreat. "How is he? where is he?" he asked of Mrs.

Moreen; but before she could speak these questions were answered by
the pressure round hid neck of a pair of arms, in shrunken sleeves,

which still were perfectlycapable of an effusive young foreign
squeeze.

"Dreadfully ill - I don't see it!" the young man cried. And then
to Morgan: "Why on earth didn't you relieve me? Why didn't you

answer my letter?"
Mrs. Moreen declared that when she wrote he was very bad, and

Pemberton learned at the same time from the boy that he had