“I won’t,” replied Folly, sharply.  “I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t.  I’ll give you up to the first officer we come to, though, if you don’t clear.”

“Ah, ga-am!” said the youth, whose head scarcely reached to Folly’s waist.  “Course you won’t give me no penny. You ain’t no lydy.”

Folly stopped in her tracks.  Her face went suddenly livid with rage.

“No lydy!” she cried in the most directly expressive of all idioms.  “If I wasn’t a perfect lydy, I’d slap your blankety blank little blank.”

At each word of the virile repartee of Cockneydom coming so incongruously from those soft lips, Lewis’s heart went down and down in big, jolting bumps.  Scarcely aware of what he was doing, he stepped out into the path.  Folly looked up and saw him.  The look of amazement in his face, eyes staring and mouth open and gulping, struck and held her for a second before she realized who it was that stood before her.

For just the fraction of a moment longer she was frightened and puzzled by Lewis’s dumfounded mien; then her mind harked back for the clue and got it.  No one had to tell her that the game was up so far as Lewis was concerned.  She knew it.  Her face suddenly crinkled up with mirth.  With a peal of laughter, she dodged him and ran improperly for her very proper little turnout.  He did not follow except with his eyes.

“Larfin’ at us, governor,” jibed the diminutive cockney, putting a rail between himself and Lewis.  “The ’uzzy!  The minute I lays my heye on that marm, I says, ‘Blime yer, you ain’t no lydy’!  I say, governor, give us a penny.”

Lewis turned away and took a few steps gropingly, head down, as though he walked in a trance.  Presently he stopped and came back, feeling with finger and thumb in his waistcoat pocket.  He drew out a gold coin, looked at it gravely, and flipped it across the rail at the ragamuffin.  Then he turned and walked off with a rapid stride.

The little cockney snatched at the coin, and popped it into his mouth.  Too overwhelmed to speak his gratitude, he stood on his head until Lewis was out of sight.  It was the first time in his life that he had handled, much less possessed, a “thick un.”

CHAPTER LI

The expert surgeon, operating for blindness on the membranes of the eye, is denied the bulwark of an anesthetic.  Such a one will tell you that the moment of success is the moment most pregnant with disaster.  To the patient who has known only the fraction of life that lies in darkness, the sudden coming of light is a miracle beyond mere resurrection from the dead.  But he is warned he must avoid any spasm of joy.  Should he cry out and start at the coming of the dawn, in that moment he bids farewell forever to the light of day.

Something of this shock of sudden sight had come to Lewis, but it came to him with no spasm of joy.  A man who has been drugged does not awake to joy, but to pain.  Liberation and suffering too often walk hand in hand.  Lewis had felt no bondage; consequently his freedom was as terrible as it was sudden.  It plunged him into depths of depression he had never before sounded.