Shutting his mouth tightly; which was never natural to him, the startled Tommy mounted the stair, listened and was convinced.  He did not enter his dishonored home.  He had no intention of ever entering it again.  With one salt tear he renounced—­a child, a mother.

On his way downstairs he was received by Shovel and party, who planted their arrows neatly.  Kids cried steadily, he was told, for the first year.  A boy one was bad enough, but a girl one was oh lawks.  He must never again expect to get playing with blokes like what they was.  Already she had got round his old gal who would care for him no more.  What would they say about this in Thrums?

Shovel even insisted on returning him his cap, and for some queer reason, this cut deepest.  Tommy about to charge, with his head down, now walked away so quietly that Shovel, who could not help liking the funny little cuss, felt a twinge of remorse, and nearly followed him with a magnanimous offer:  to treat him as if he were still respectable.

Tommy lay down on a distant stair, one of the very stairs where she had sat with him.  Ladies, don’t you dare to pity him now, for he won’t stand it.  Rage was what he felt, and a man in a rage (as you may know if you are married) is only to be soothed by the sight of all womankind in terror of him.  But you may look upon your handiwork, and gloat, an you will, on the wreck you have made.  A young gentleman trusted one of you; behold the result.  O!  O!  O!  O! now do you understand why we men cannot abide you?

If she had told him flat that his mother, and his alone, she would have, and so there was an end of it.  Ah, catch them taking a straight road.  But to put on those airs of helplessness, to wave him that gay good-by, and then the moment his back was turned, to be off through the air on—­perhaps on her muff, to the home he had thought to lure her from.  In a word, to be diddled by a girl when one flatters himself he is diddling!  S’death, a dashing fellow finds it hard to bear.  Nevertheless, he has to bear it, for oh, Tommy, Tommy, ’tis the common lot of man.

His hand sought his pocket for the penny that had brought him comfort in dark hours before now; but, alack, she had deprived him even of it.  Never again should his pinkie finger go through that warm hole, and at the thought a sense of his forlornness choked him and he cried.  You may pity him a little now.

Darkness came and hid him even from himself.  He is not found again until a time of the night that is not marked on ornamental clocks, but has an hour to itself on the watch which a hundred thousand or so of London women carry in their breasts; the hour when men steal homewards trickling at the mouth and drawing back from their own shadows to the wives they once went a-maying with, or the mothers who had such travail at the bearing of them, as if for great ends.  Out of this, the drunkard’s hour, rose the wan face of Tommy, who had waked up somewhere clammy cold and quaking, and he was a very little boy, so he ran to his mother.