“Bedad, my boy,” exclaimed O’Gree, “I’m devilish sorry!  I wouldn’t have had it happen for a quarter’s salary,—­though I sadly need a new pair of breeches.  She’s a supercilious cat-o-mountain, and she loses no opportunity of insulting me, but after all she’s a woman.”

“By-the-by, Waymark,” he added in a moment, “what a stunner the new governess is!  You’re a lucky dog, to sit in the same room with her.  What’s her name, I say?”

“Miss Enderby.  You’ve seen her, have you?”

“I caught a glimpse of her as she came downstairs; it was quite enough; she floored me.  She’s never been out of my thoughts for a minute since I saw her.  ’I love her, I love her, and who shall dare, to chide me for loving that teacher fair!’”

“Well, yes,” said Waymark, “she has a tolerable face; seems to me a long way too good to be teaching those unlicked cubs.  The dragon wasn’t too civil to her, though it was the first day.”

“Not civil to her?  If I were present, and heard that woman breathe the slight eat incivility, I’d—­”

He broke off in the midst of his vehemence with a startled look towards the door.

“Mr. Egger,” he exclaimed, “a song; I beg, a song.  Come, I’ll lead off.

’Miss Enderby hath a beaming eye’—­

Bah!  I’m not in voice to-night.”

Egger was persuaded to sit down to the piano.  It was a mournful instrument, reduced to discordant wheeziness by five-finger exercises, but the touch of the Swiss could still evoke from it some kind of harmony.  He sang a Volkslied, and in a way which showed that there was poetry in the man’s nature, though his outward appearance gave so little promise of it.  His voice was very fair, and well suited to express the tender pathos of these inimitable melodies.  Waymark always enjoyed this singing; his eyes brightened, and a fine emotion played about his lips.  And as he walked along the dark ways to his lodgings, Egger’s voice was still in his ears—­

“Der Mensch wenn er fortgeht, der kommt nimmermefr.”

“Heaven be thanked, no!” the young man said to himself.

Poverty was his familiar companion, and had been so for years.  His rent paid each week, there often remained a sum quite insufficient for the absolute necessities of existence; for anything more, he had to look to chance pupils in the evenings, and what little he could earn with his pen.  He wrote constantly, but as yet had only succeeded in getting two articles printed.  Then, it was a necessity of his existence to mix from time to time in the life of the town, and a stroll into the Strand after nightfall inevitably led to the expenditure of whatever cash his pocket contained.  He was passionately found of the theatre; the lights about the open entrance drew him on irresistibly, and if, as so often, he had to choose between a meal and a seat in the gallery, the meal was sacrificed.  Hunger, indeed, was his normal state; semi-starvation, alternating with surfeits of cheap and unwholesome food, brought about an unhealthy condition of body.  Often he returned to Walcot Square from his day-long drudgery, and threw himself upon the bed, too exhausted to light a fire and make his tea,—­for he was his own servant in all things except the weekly cleaning-out of the room.  Those were dark hours, and they had to be struggled through in solitude.