But Paul heeded not this invitation.

"I will eat the bread of idleness and charity no longer," said he,
sullenly. "Good-by; and if ever I can pay you what I have cost you, I
will."

He turned away as he spoke; and the dame, kindling with resentment at his
unseemly return to her proffered kindness, hallooed after him, and bade
that dark-coloured gentleman who keeps the _fire-office_ below go along
with him.

Swelling with anger, pride, shame, and a half-joyous feeling of
emancipated independence, Paul walked on, he knew not whither, with his
head in the air, and his legs marshalling themselves into a military gait
of defiance. He had not proceeded far before he heard his name uttered
behind him; he turned, and saw the rueful face of Dummie Dunnaker.

Very inoffensively had that respectable person been employed during the
last part of the scene we have described in caressing his afflicted eye,
and muttering philosophical observations on the danger incurred by all
those who are acquainted with ladies of a choleric temperament; when Mrs.
Lobkins, turning round after Paul's departure, and seeing the pitiful
person of that Dummie Dunnaker, whose name she remembered Paul had
mentioned in his opening speech, and whom, therefore, with an illogical
confusion of ideas, she considered a party in the late dispute, exhausted
upon him all that rage which it was necessary for her comfort that she
should unburden somewhere.

She seized the little man by the collar,--the tenderest of all places in