stomach.

Bob Fenner's dance-room, three doors away, was a thorn in his side.
Three nights in the week a brazen comet struck into a set of lancers,
drowning the metallic thud of the piano and compelling his ear to follow
the latest popular air to the last bar.

His solitary life, his fiddling, and his singular mixture of gruffness
and politeness had bred legends among the women of the neighbourhood.
He was a German baron, who had forfeited his title and estates through
killing a man in a duel; and never a milder pair of eyes looked timidly
through spectacles. He was a famous musician, who had chosen to blot
himself out of the world for love of a high-born lady; and, in his
opinion, women were useful to cook and sew, nothing more.




CHAPTER 4



JONAH DISCOVERS THE BABY


Joey the pieman had scented a new customer in Mrs Yabsley, and on the
following Saturday night he stopped in front of the house and rattled
the lids of his cans to attract her attention. His voice, thin and
cracked with the wear of the streets, chanted his familiar cry to an
accompaniment faintly suggestive of clashing cymbals: