But Loristan did not turn and walk away.  He looked deep into the lad’s eyes as if he were searching to find some certainty.  Then he said in a low voice, “You know how poor I am.”

“I—­I don’t care!” said The Rat.  “You—­you’re like a king to me.  I’d stand up and be shot to bits if you told me to do it.”

“I am so poor that I am not sure I can give you enough dry bread to eat—­always.  Marco and Lazarus and I are often hungry.  Sometimes you might have nothing to sleep on but the floor.  But I can find a place for you if I take you with me,” said Loristan.  “Do you know what I mean by a place?”

“Yes, I do,” answered The Rat.  “It’s what I’ve never had before—­sir.”

What he knew was that it meant some bit of space, out of all the world, where he would have a sort of right to stand, howsoever poor and bare it might be.

“I’m not used to beds or to food enough,” he said.  But he did not dare to insist too much on that “place.”  It seemed too great a thing to be true.

Loristan took his arm.

“Come with me,” he said.  “We won’t part.  I believe you are to be trusted.”

The Rat turned quite white in a sort of anguish of joy.  He had never cared for any one in his life.  He had been a sort of young Cain, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him.  And during the last twelve hours he had plunged into a tumultuous ocean of boyish hero-worship.  This man seemed like a sort of god to him.  What he had said and done the day before, in what had been really The Rat’s hours of extremity, after that appalling night—­the way he had looked into his face and understood it all, the talk at the table when he had listened to him seriously, comprehending and actually respecting his plans and rough maps; his silent companionship as they followed the pauper hearse together—­these things were enough to make the lad longingly ready to be any sort of servant or slave to him if he might see and be spoken to by him even once or twice a day.

The Squad wore a look of dismay for a moment, and Loristan saw it.

“I am going to take your captain with me,” he said.  “But he will come back to Barracks.  So will Marco.”

“Will yer go on with the game?” asked Cad, as eager spokesman.  “We want to go on being the ‘Secret Party.’”

“Yes, I’ll go on,” The Rat answered.  “I won’t give it up.  There’s a lot in the papers to-day.”

So they were pacified and went on their way, and Loristan and Lazarus and Marco and The Rat went on theirs also.

“Queer thing is,” The Rat thought as they walked together, “I’m a bit afraid to speak to him unless he speaks to me first.  Never felt that way before with any one.”

He had jeered at policemen and had impudently chaffed “swells,” but he felt a sort of secret awe of this man, and actually liked the feeling.

“It’s as if I was a private and he was commander-in-chief,” he thought.  “That’s it.”