Paul grinned, because he did not know what else to do, so as to show his intellectual appreciation of the parable; but in his heart, for all his gratitude, he thought Barney bill rather a prosy moralizer.  It was one of the disabilities of advanced old age.  Alas! what can bridge the gulf between fourteen and fifty?

“Anyhow, you’ve got a friend at the back of yer, sonny, and don’t make no mistake about it.  If you’re in trouble let me know.  I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

That, for a season, was the end of Barney Bill, and Paul found himself thrillingly alone in London.  At first its labyrinthine vastness overwhelmed him, causing him to feel an unimportant atom, which may have been good for his soul, but was not agreeable to his vanity.  By degrees, however, he learned the lay of the great thoroughfares, especially those leading to the quarters where artists congregate, and, conscious of purpose and of money jingling in his pocket, he began to hold his head high in the crowded streets.  In the house in Barn Street, off the Euston Road, where he lodged, he was called “Mr. Paul” by his landlady, Mrs. Seddon, and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Jane, which was comforting and stimulating.  Jane, a lanky, fair, blue-eyed girl, who gave promise of good looks, attended to his modest wants with a zeal somewhat out of proportion to the payment received.  Paul had the novel sensation of finding some one at his beck and call.  He beckoned and called often, for the sheer pleasure of it.  So great was the change in his life that, in these early days, it seemed a3 if he had already come into his kingdom.  He strutted about, poor child, like the prince in a fairy tale, and, in spite of Barney Bill’s precepts-lie outgrew his boots immediately.  Mrs. Seddon, an old friend of Barney Bill, whom she addressed and spoke as Mr. William, kept a small shop in which she sold newspapers and twine and penny bottles of ink.  In the little back-parlour Mrs. Seddon and Tane and Paul had their meals, while the shop boy, an inconsiderable creature with a perpetual cold in his head, attended to the unexpected customer.  To Paul, this boy, with whom a few months ago he would have joyously changed places, was as the dust beneath his feet.  He sent him on errands in a lordly way, treating him as, indeed, he had treated the youth of Budge Street after his triumph over Billy Goodge, and the boy obeyed meekly.  Paul believed in himself; the boy didn’t.  Almost from the beginning he usurped an ascendancy over the little household.  For all their having lived in the great maelstrom of London, he found his superficial experience of life larger than that of mother and daughter.  They had never seen machinery at work, did not know the difference between an elm and a beech and had never read Sir Walter Scott.  Mrs. Seddon, thin, careworn and slackly good-natured, ever lamented the loss of an astonishingly brilliant husband; Jane was markedly the more competent of the two.  She had character, and, even while slaving for the romantic youth, made it clear to him that for no other man alive would she so demean herself.  Paul resolved to undertake her education.