"It's a long story, Villiers, and a strange one too,
but you can hear it if you like."

"Come on, then. Take my arm, you don't seem very
strong."

The ill-assorted pair moved slowly up Rupert Street;
the one in dirty, evil-looking rags, and the other attired in
the regulation uniform of a man about town, trim, glossy, and
eminently well-to-do. Villiers had emerged from his restaurant
after an excellent dinner of many courses, assisted by an
ingratiating little flask of Chianti, and, in that frame of mind
which was with him almost chronic, had delayed a moment by the
door, peering round in the dimly-lighted street in search of
those mysterious incidents and persons with which the streets of
London teem in every quarter and every hour. Villiers prided
himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways
of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an
assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment. Thus he
stood by the lamp-post surveying the passers-by with
undisguised curiosity, and with that gravity known only to the
systematic diner, had just enunciated in his mind the formula:
"London has been called the city of encounters; it is more than
that, it is the city of Resurrections," when these reflections
were suddenly interrupted by a piteous whine at his elbow, and
a deplorable appeal for alms. He looked around in some
irritation, and with a sudden shock found himself confronted
with the embodied proof of his somewhat stilted fancies. There,
close beside him, his face altered and disfigured by poverty and
disgrace, his body barely covered by greasy ill-fitting rags,