No eye surveying this procession would have paused for a moment on Thomas Bird.  In costume there was nothing to distinguish him from hundreds of rather shabby clerks who passed along with their out-of-fashion chimney-pot and badly rolled umbrella; his gait was that of a man who takes no exercise beyond the daily walk to and from his desk; the casual glance could see nothing in his features but patient dullness tending to good humour.  He might be thirty, he might be forty—­impossible to decide.  Yet when a ray of sunshine fell upon him, and he lifted his eyes to the eastward promise, there shone in his countenance something one might vainly have sought through the streaming concourse of which Thomas Bird was an unregarded atom.  For him, it appeared, the struggling sunlight had a message of hope.  Trouble cleared from his face; he smiled unconsciously and quickened his steps.

For fifteen years he had walked to and fro over Blackfriars Bridge, leaving his home in Camberwell at eight o’clock and reaching it again at seven.  Fate made him a commercial clerk as his father before him; he earned more than enough for his necessities, but seemed to have reached the limit of promotion, for he had no influential friends, and he lacked the capacity to rise by his own efforts.  There may have been some calling for which Thomas was exactly suited, but he did not know of it; in the office he proved himself a trustworthy machine, with no opportunity of becoming anything else.  His parents were dead, his kindred scattered, he lived, as for several years past, in lodgings.  But it never occurred to him to think of his lot as mournful.  A man of sociable instincts, he had many acquaintances, some of whom he cherished.  An extreme simplicity marked his tastes, and the same characteristic appeared in his conversation; an easy man to deceive, easy to make fun of, yet impossible to dislike, or despise—­unless by the despicable.  He delighted in stories of adventure, of bravery by flood or field, and might have posed—­had he ever posed at all—­as something of an authority on North Pole expeditions and the geography of Polynesia.

He received his salary once a month, and to-day was pay-day:  the consciousness of having earned a certain number of sovereigns always set his thoughts on possible purchases, and at present he was revolving the subject of his wardrobe.  Certainly it needed renewal, but Thomas could not decide at which end to begin, head or feet.  His position in a leading house demanded a good hat, the bad weather called for new boots.  Living economically as he did, it should have been a simple matter to resolve the doubt by purchasing both articles, but, for one reason and another, Thomas seldom had a surplus over the expenses of his lodgings; in practice he found it very difficult to save a sovereign for other needs.

When evening released him he walked away in a cheerful frame of mind, grasping the money in his trousers’ pocket, and all but decided to make some acquisition on the way home.  Near Ludgate Circus some one addressed him over his shoulder.