Excuse me for recalling to your memory the offer of assistance you so kindly made me during the journey from Dover to London, in which I was so fortunate as to travel with a man like you.  Having beaten the whole town, ignorant of what wood to make arrows, nearly at the end of my resources, my spirit profoundly discouraged, I venture to avail myself of your permission, knowing your good heart.  Since I saw you I have run through all the misfortunes of the calendar, and cannot tell what door is left at which I have not knocked.  I presented myself at the business firm with whose name you supplied me, but being unfortunately in rags, they refused to give me your address.  Is this not very much in the English character?  They told me to write, and said they would forward the letter.  I put all my hopes in you. 
     Believe me, my dear sir,
          (whatever you may decide)
               Your devoted
                    Louis Ferrand.

Shelton looked at the envelope, and saw, that it, bore date a week ago.  The face of the young vagrant rose before him, vital, mocking, sensitive; the sound of his quick French buzzed in his ears, and, oddly, the whole whiff of him had a power of raising more vividly than ever his memories of Antonia.  It had been at the end of the journey from Hyeres to London that he had met him; that seemed to give the youth a claim.

He took his hat and hurried, to Blank Row.  Dismissing his cab at the corner of Victoria Street he with difficulty found the house in question.  It was a doorless place, with stone-flagged corridor—­in other words, a “doss-house.”  By tapping on a sort of ticket-office with a sliding window, he attracted the attention of a blowsy woman with soap-suds on her arms, who informed him that the person he was looking for had gone without leaving his address.

“But isn’t there anybody,” asked Shelton, “of whom I can make inquiry?”

“Yes; there’s a Frenchman.”  And opening an inner door she bellowed:  “Frenchy!  Wanted!” and disappeared.

A dried-up, yellow little man, cynical and weary in the face, as if a moral steam-roller had passed over it, answered this call, and stood, sniffing, as it were, at Shelton, on whom he made the singular impression of some little creature in a cage.

“He left here ten days ago, in the company of a mulatto.  What do you want with him, if I may ask?” The little man’s yellow cheeks were wrinkled with suspicion.

Shelton produced the letter.

“Ah! now I know you”—­a pale smile broke through the Frenchman’s crow’s-feet—­“he spoke of you.  ‘If I can only find him,’ he used to say, ’I ‘m saved.’  I liked that young man; he had ideas.”

“Is there no way of getting at him through his consul?”

The Frenchman shook his head.

“Might as well look for diamonds at the bottom of the sea.”

“Do you think he will come back here?  But by that time I suppose, you’ll hardly be here yourself?”