He wanted to see Marco again, but he wanted more to see the tall man with the soft dark eyes and that queer look of being a swell in spite of his shabby clothes and the dingy place he lived in.  There was something about him which made you keep on looking at him, and wanting to know what he was thinking of, and why you felt as if you’d take orders from him as you’d take orders from your general, if you were a soldier.  He looked, somehow, like a soldier, but as if he were something more—­as if people had taken orders from him all his life, and always would take orders from him.  And yet he had that quiet voice and those fine, easy movements, and he was not a soldier at all, but only a poor man who wrote things for papers which did not pay him well enough to give him and his son a comfortable living.  Through all the time of his seclusion with the battered bath and the soap and water, The Rat thought of him, and longed to have another look at him and hear him speak again.  He did not see any reason why he should have let him sleep on his sofa or why he should give him a breakfast before he turned him out to face the world.  It was first-rate of him to do it.  The Rat felt that when he was turned out, after he had had the coffee, he should want to hang about the neighborhood just on the chance of seeing him pass by sometimes.  He did not know what he was going to do.  The parish officials would by this time have taken his dead father, and he would not see him again.  He did not want to see him again.  He had never seemed like a father.  They had never cared anything for each other.  He had only been a wretched outcast whose best hours had been when he had drunk too much to be violent and brutal.  Perhaps, The Rat thought, he would be driven to going about on his platform on the pavements and begging, as his father had tried to force him to do.  Could he sell newspapers?  What could a crippled lad do unless he begged or sold papers?

Lazarus was waiting for him in the passage.  The Rat held back a little.

“Perhaps they’d rather not eat their breakfast with me,” he hesitated.  “I’m not—­I’m not the kind they are.  I could swallow the coffee out here and carry the bread away with me.  And you could thank him for me.  I’d want him to know I thanked him.”

Lazarus also had a steady eye.  The Rat realized that he was looking him over as if he were summing him up.

“You may not be the kind they are, but you may be of a kind the Master sees good in.  If he did not see something, he would not ask you to sit at his table.  You are to come with me.”

The Squad had seen good in The Rat, but no one else had.  Policemen had moved him on whenever they set eyes on him, the wretched women of the slums had regarded him as they regarded his darting, thieving namesake; loafing or busy men had seen in him a young nuisance to be kicked or pushed out of the way.  The Squad had not called “good” what they saw in him.  They would have yelled with laughter if they had heard any one else call it so.  “Goodness” was not considered an attraction in their world.