“Uh—­yes,” Morton hesitated.

A music-hall—­not mere vaudeville!  Mr. Wrenn could hardly keep his feet on the pavement as they scampered to it and got ninepenny seats.  He would have thought it absurd to pay eighteen cents for a ticket, but pence—­They were out at nine-thirty.  Happily tired, Mr. Wrenn suggested that they go to a temperance hotel at his expense, for he had read in Baedeker that temperance hotels were respectable—­also cheap.

“No, no!” frowned Morton.  “Tell you what you do, Bill.  You go to a hotel, and I’ll beat it down to a lodging-house on Duke Street....  Juke Street!...  Remember how I ran onto Pete on the street?  He told me you could get a cot down there for fourpence.”

“Aw, come on to a hotel.  Please do!  It ’d just hurt me to think of you sleeping in one of them holes.  I wouldn’t sleep a bit if—­”

“Say, for the love of Mike, Wrenn, get wise!  Get wise, son!  I’m not going to sponge on you, and that’s all there is to it.”

Bill Wrenn strode into their company for a minute, and quoth the terrible Bill: 

“Well, you don’t need to get so sore about it.  I don’t go around asking folks can I give ’em a meal ticket all the time, let me tell you, and when I do—­Oh rats!  Say, I didn’t mean to get huffy, Morty.  But, doggone you, old man, you can’t shake me this easy.  I sye, old top, I’m peeved; yessir.  We’ll go Dutch to a lodging-house, or even walk the streets.”

“All right, sir; all right.  I’ll take you up on that.  We’ll sleep in an areaway some place.”

They walked to the outskirts of Liverpool, questing the desirable dark alley.  Awed by the solid quietude and semigrandeur of the large private estates, through narrow streets where dim trees leaned over high walls whose long silent stretches were broken only by mysterious little doors, they tramped bashfully, inspecting, but always rejecting, nooks by lodge gates.

They came to a stone church with a porch easily reached from the street, a large and airy stone porch, just suited, Morton declared, “to a couple of hoboes like us.  If a bobby butts in, why, we’ll just slide under them seats.  Then the bobby can go soak his head.”

Mr. Wrenn had never so far defied society as to steal a place for sleeping.  He felt very uneasy, like a man left naked on the street by robbers, as he rolled up his coat for a pillow and removed his shoes in a place that was perfectly open to the street.  The paved floor was cold to his bare feet, and, as he tried to go to sleep, it kept getting colder and colder to his back.  Reaching out his hand, he fretfully rubbed the cracks between stones.  He scowled up at the ceiling of the porch.  He couldn’t bear to look out through the door, for it framed the vicar’s house, with lamplight bodying forth latticed windows, suggesting soft beds and laughter and comfortable books.  All the while his chilled back was aching in new places.