An anemic, flirtatious group passed us, the girls in front, the boys behind.

“Good God, Campion, what can you do?” I asked.

“Pay them, old chap,” he returned quickly.

“What’s the good of that?”

“Good?  Oh, I see!” He laughed, with a touch of scorn.  “It’s a question of definition.  When you see a fellow creature suffering and it shocks your refined susceptibilities and you say ‘poor devil’ and pass on, you think you have pitied him.  But you haven’t.  You think pity’s a passive virtue.  It isn’t.  If you really pity anybody, you go mad to help him—­you don’t stand by with tears of sensibility running down your cheeks.  You stretch out your hand, because you’ve damn well got to.  If he won’t take it, or wipes you over the head, that’s his look-out.  You can’t work miracles.  But once in a way he does take it, and then—­well, you work like hell to pull him through.  And if you do, what bigger thing is there in the world than the salvation of a human soul?”

“It’s worth living for,” said I.

“It’s worth doing any confounded old thing for,” he declared.

I envied Campion as I had envied no man before.  He was alive in heart and soul and brain; I was not quite alive even yet.  But I felt better for meeting him.  I told him so.  He tugged his beard again and laughed.

“I am a happy old crank.  Perhaps that’s the reason.”

At the door of the hall of the Lambeth Ethical Society he stopped short and turned on me; his jaw dropped and he regarded me in dismay.

“I’m the flightiest and feather-headedest ass that ever brayed,” he informed me.  “I just remember I sent Miss Faversham a ticket for this meeting about a fortnight ago.  I had clean forgotten it, though something uncomfortable has been tickling the back of my head all the time.  I’m miserably sorry.”

I hastened to reassure him.  “Miss Faversham and I are still good friends.  I don’t think she’ll mind my nodding to her from the other side of the room.”  Indeed, she had written me one or two letters since my recovery perfect in tact and sympathy, and had put her loyal friendship at my service.

“Even if we meet,” I smiled, “nothing tragic will happen.”

He expressed his relief.

“But what,” I asked, “is Miss Faversham doing in this galley?”

“I suppose she is displaying an intelligent interest in modern thought,” he said, with boyish delight at the chance I had offered him.

“Touche,” said I, with a bow, and we entered the hall.

It was crowded.  The audience consisted of the better class of artisans, tradesmen, and foremen in factories:  there was a sprinkling of black-coated clerks and unskilled labouring men.  A few women’s hats sprouted here and there among the men’s heads like weeds in a desert.  There were women, too, in proportionately greater numbers, on the platform at the end of the hall, and among them I was quick to notice Eleanor Faversham.  As Campion disliked platforms and high places in synagogues, we sat on one of the benches near the door.  He explained it was also out of consideration for me.