“Mr. Mainwaring,” said I, “such talk is either blasphemous or—­”

He did not allow me to state the alternative, but caught up the word in a great cry.

“Blasphemous!  Why, man alive! for what are you taking me?  Do you think this is some unholy jest?  Can’t you see that I am in deadly earnest?  Come and see me where I live—­” he caught me by the arm, as if he would drag me away then and there, “among the poor in Hoxton.  You scarcely know where Hoxton is—­I didn’t when I was a man of ease like yourself—­that wilderness of grey despair where the sun of the world scarcely shines, let alone the Light of God.  Come and see for yourself, man, whether I am lying!”

Then it dawned upon me that the man had been talking from innermost depths, that he was almost terrifyingly sincere.

“I must ask you to pardon me,” said I, “for appearing to doubt your good faith.  You must attribute it to my entire unfamiliarity with the terms of Evangelical piety.”

He looked at me queerly for a moment, and then, in the quiet tones of a man of the world, said, smiling pleasantly: 

“Very many years ago I had the pleasure of knowing your grandfather, the late baronet.  May I say that you remind me of him?”

I have never heard an apology more gracefully and tactfully accepted.  For an unregenerate second he had become the gallant Rupert Mainwaring again, and showed me wherein might lie his attraction.

“Pray be seated,” said he, more gravely, “and allow me to explain.”

He unfolded his story.  It was well, said he, that an outsider (I an outsider in that familiar room!) should hear it.  I was at liberty to make it public.  Indeed, publicity was what he earnestly craved.  As far as my memory serves me, for my wits were whirling as I listened, the following is an epitome of his narrative: 

He had been a man of sin—­not only in the vague ecclesiastical sense, but in downright, practical earnest.  He had committed every imaginable crime, save the odd few that lead to penal servitude and the gallows.  He drank, he betrayed women, he cheated at cards, he had an evil reputation on the turf.  His companions were chosen from the harlotry and knavery of the civilised world.  He had lured Judith from her first husband, thus breaking his heart, poor man, so that he died soon after.  He had married Judith, and had deserted her for a barmaid whom in her turn he had abandoned.  He wallowed, to use his own expression, in the trough of iniquity.  He was, as I had always understood, about as choice a blackguard as it would be possible to meet outside a gaol.  One day a pretty girl, whom he had been following in the street, unwittingly enticed him into a revivalist meeting.  He described that meeting so vividly that had my stupefied mind been capable of fresh emotions, I too might have been converted at second hand by the revivalist preacher.  He repeated parts of the sermon, rose to his feet, waved his arms, thundered out the commonplaces of Salvation Army Christianity, as if he had made an amazing theological discovery.  It was pathetic.  It was ludicrous.  It was also inconceivably painful.  At last he mopped his forehead and shiny head.