’But I was in a fearful state.  I didn’t know where I was going,—­I walked straight on, street after street, and just missed being run over half a dozen times.  Perspiration dripped from me.  The only thing I knew was that I had triumphed over a damned brute who had insulted me.  I had stopped his mouth; he believed he had made a stupid mistake; he could never have imagined that a fellow without a sovereign in the world was speaking to him like that.  If I had knocked him down the satisfaction would have been very slight in comparison.’

The gloom of nightfall had come upon us, and I could no longer see his face distinctly, but his voice told me that he still savoured that triumph.  He spoke with exultant passion.  I was beginning to understand Ireton.

‘Isn’t the story interesting?’ he asked, after a pause.

‘Very.  Pray go on.’

’Well, you mustn’t suppose that it was a mere bit of crazy bravado.  I knew how I was going to get the money—­the forty guineas.  And as soon as I could command myself, I went to do the business.

’A fellow-clerk in the drug warehouse had been badly in want of money not long before that, and I knew he had borrowed twenty pounds from a loan office, paying it back week by week, with heavy interest, out of his screw, poor devil.  I could do the same.  I went straight off to the lender.  It was a fellow called Crowther; he lived in Dean Street, Soho; in a window on the ground floor there was a card with “Sums from One pound to a Hundred lent at short notice.”  I was lucky enough to find him at home; we did our business in a little back room, where there was a desk and a couple of chairs, and nothing else but dirt.  I expected to find an oldish man, but he seemed about my own age, and on the whole I didn’t dislike the look of him,—­a rather handsome young fellow, fairly well dressed, with a taking sort of smile.  I began by telling him where I was employed, and mentioned my fellow-clerk, whom he knew.  That made him quite cheerful; he offered me a drink, and we got on very well.  But he thought forty guineas a big sum; would I tell him what I wanted it for?  No, I wouldn’t do that.  Well, how long would it take me to pay it back?  Could I pay a pound a week?  No, I couldn’t.  He began to shake his head and to look at me thoughtfully.  Then he asked no end of questions, to find out who I was and what people I had belonging to me, and what my chances were.  Then he made me have another drink, and at last I was persuaded into telling him the whole story.  First of all he stared, and then he laughed; I never saw a man laugh more heartily.  At last he said, “Why didn’t you tell me you had value in hand?  See here, I’ll look at that picture on Monday morning, and I shouldn’t wonder if we can do business.”  This alarmed me,—­I was afraid he might get talking to the picture-dealer.  But he promised not to say a word about me.