“You jest stick to me, Shovel,” he said airily.  “Keep a grip on my hand, same as if yer was Elspeth.”

“But what was we copped for, Tommy?” entreated humble Shovel.

Tommy asked him if he knew what a butler was, and Shovel remembered, confusedly, that there had been a portrait of a butler in his father’s news-sheet.

“Well, then,” said Tommy, inspired by this same source, “there’s a room a butler has, and it is a pantry, so you and me we crawled through the winder and we opened the door to the gang.  You and me was copped.  They catched you below the table and me stabbing the butler.”

“It was me what stabbed the butler,” Shovel interposed, jealously.

“How could you do it, Shovel?”

“With a knife, I tell yer!”

“Why, you didn’t have no knife,” said Tommy, impatiently.

This crushed Shovel, but he growled sulkily: 

“Well, I bit him in the leg.”

“Not you,” said selfish Tommy.  “You forgets about repenting, and if I let yer bite him, you would brag about it.  It’s safer without, Shovel.”

Perhaps it was.  “How long did I get in quod, then, Tommy?”

“Fourteen days.”

“So did you?” Shovel said, with quick anxiety.

“I got a month,” replied Tommy, firmly.

Shovel roared a word that would never have admitted him to the hall.  Then, “I’m as game as you, and gamer,” he whined.

“But I’m better at repenting.  I tell yer, I’ll cry when I’m repenting.”  Tommy’s face lit up, and Shovel could not help saying, with a curious look at it: 

“You—­you ain’t like any other cove I knows,” to which Tommy replied, also in an awe-struck voice: 

“I’m so queer, Shovel, that when I thinks ’bout myself I’m—­I’m sometimes near feared.”

“What makes your face for to shine like that?  Is it thinking about the blow-out?”

No, it was hardly that, but Tommy could not tell what it was.  He and the saying about art for art’s sake were in the streets that night, looking for each other.

The splendor of the brightly lighted hall, which was situated in one of the meanest streets of perhaps the most densely populated quarter in London, broke upon the two boys suddenly and hit each in his vital part, tapping an invitation on Tommy’s brain-pan and taking Shovel coquettishly in the stomach.  Now was the moment when Shovel meant to strip Tommy of the ticket, but the spectacle in front dazed him, and he stopped to tell a vegetable barrow how he loved his dear father and his dear mother, and all the dear kids at home.  Then Tommy darted forward and was immediately lost in the crowd surging round the steps of the hall.