before Nellie. He fingered a half-crown in his pocket, with a bushman's
careless generosity. By skilful manoeuvring and convenient yielding to
the pressure of the crowd he managed to get near the blind girl as she
finished her hymn. Nellie turned round, looking away--he thought
afterwards: was it intentionally?--and he slipped his offering into the
singer' fingers like a culprit. Then he walked off hastily with his
companion, as red and confused as though he had committed some dastardly
act. Just as they reached the second arcade they heard another discordant
hymn rise amid the shuffling din.

There were no street-walkers in Paddy's Market, Ned could see. He had
caught his foot clumsily on the dress of one above the town-hall, a
dashing demi-mondaine with rouged cheeks and unnaturally bright eyes and
a huge velvet-covered hat of the Gainsborough shape and had been covered
with confusion when she turned sharply round on him with a "Now, clumsy,
I'm not a door-mat." Then he had noticed that the sad sisterhood were out
in force where the bright gas-jets of the better-class shops illuminated
the pavement, swaggering it mostly where the kerbs were lined with young
fellows, fairly-well dressed as a rule, who talked of cricket and race
horses and boating and made audible remarks concerning the women, grave
and gay, who passed by in the throng. Nearing the poorer end of
George-street, they seemed to disappear, both sisterhood and kerb
loungers, until near the Haymarket itself they found the larrikin element
gathered strongly under the flaring lights of hotel-bars and music hall
entrances. But in Paddy's Market itself there were not even larrikins.
Ned did not even notice anybody drunk.

He had seen drinking and drunkenness enough that day. Wherever there was
poverty he had seen viciousness flourishing. Wherever there was despair
there was a drowning of sorrow in drink. They had passed scores of public