* * * * *

When he awakened it was morning, and Lazarus was standing by the side of the sofa looking down at him.

“You will want to make yourself clean,” he said.  “It must be done.”

“Clean!” said The Rat, with his squeaky laugh.  “I couldn’t keep clean when I had a room to live in, and now where am I to wash myself?” He sat up and looked about him.

“Give me my crutches,” he said.  “I’ve got to go.  They’ve let me sleep here all night.  They didn’t turn me into the street.  I don’t know why they didn’t.  Marco’s father—­he’s the right sort.  He looks like a swell.”

“The Master,” said Lazarus, with a rigid manner, “the Master is a great gentleman.  He would turn no tired creature into the street.  He and his son are poor, but they are of those who give.  He desires to see and talk to you again.  You are to have bread and coffee with him and the young Master.  But it is I who tell you that you cannot sit at table with them until you are clean.  Come with me,” and he handed him his crutches.  His manner was authoritative, but it was the manner of a soldier; his somewhat stiff and erect movements were those of a soldier, also, and The Rat liked them because they made him feel as if he were in barracks.  He did not know what was going to happen, but he got up and followed him on his crutches.

Lazarus took him to a closet under the stairs where a battered tin bath was already full of hot water, which the old soldier himself had brought in pails.  There were soap and coarse, clean towels on a wooden chair, and also there was a much worn but cleanly suit of clothes.

“Put these on when you have bathed,” Lazarus ordered, pointing to them.  “They belong to the young Master and will be large for you, but they will be better than your own.”  And then he went out of the closet and shut the door.

It was a new experience for The Rat.  So long as he remembered, he had washed his face and hands—­when he had washed them at all—­at an iron tap set in the wall of a back street or court in some slum.  His father and himself had long ago sunk into the world where to wash one’s self is not a part of every-day life.  They had lived amid dirt and foulness, and when his father had been in a maudlin state, he had sometimes cried and talked of the long-past days when he had shaved every morning and put on a clean shirt.

To stand even in the most battered of tin baths full of clean hot water and to splash and scrub with a big piece of flannel and plenty of soap was a marvelous thing.  The Rat’s tired body responded to the novelty with a curious feeling of freshness and comfort.

“I dare say swells do this every day,” he muttered.  “I’d do it myself if I was a swell.  Soldiers have to keep themselves so clean they shine.”

When, after making the most of his soap and water, he came out of the closet under the stairs, he was as fresh as Marco himself; and, though his clothes had been built for a more stalwart body, his recognition of their cleanliness filled him with pleasure.  He wondered if by any effort he could keep himself clean when he went out into the world again and had to sleep in any hole the police did not order him out of.