sprightly insouciant appearance. Since his fifteenth year he had lived,
Heaven knew how, getting sometimes a minor engagement at some minor music-
hall, sometimes a temporary job as secretary-valet-companion to a roving
invalid, dining now and then on plovers' eggs and asparagus at one of the
smarter West End restaurants, at other times devouring a kipper or a
sausage in some stuffy Edgware Road eating-house; always seemingly amused
by life, and always amusing. It is possible that somewhere in such heart
as he possessed there lurked a rankling bitterness against the hard
things of life, or a scrap of gratitude towards the one or two friends
who had helped him disinterestedly, but his most intimate associates
could not have guessed at the existence of such feelings. Tony Luton was
just a merry-eyed dancing faun, whom Fate had surrounded with streets
instead of woods, and it would have been in the highest degree inartistic
to have sounded him for a heart or a heartache.

The dancing of the faun took one day a livelier and more assured turn,
the joyousness became more real, and the worst of the vicissitudes seemed
suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable
abilities, supplied Tony with a song, for which he obtained a trial
performance at an East End hall. Dressed as a jockey, for no particular
reason except that the costume suited him, he sang, "They quaff the gay
bubbly in Eccleston Square" to an appreciative audience, which included
the manager of a famous West End theatre of varieties. Tony and his song
won the managerial favour, and were immediately transplanted to the West
End house, where they scored a success of which the drooping music-hall
industry was at the moment badly in need.

It was just after the great catastrophe, and men of the London world were
in no humour to think; they had witnessed the inconceivable befall them,
they had nothing but political ruin to stare at, and they were anxious to