their lives long, enslaved to her countless and tyrant activities by
their own poverty, or by their fellow-creatures' misfortune, cruelties,
and sins. Was it thus she was going to deal with him, Dominic Iglesias?
Was he to be among the great city's bondmen through the coming years,
better acquainted with the very earthly light which walks her streets by
night, than with the heavenly light which gladdens the sweet face of day
in the open country and upon the open sea? And for a moment the boy's
heart rebelled, hungry for pleasure, hungry for wide experience, hungry
even for knowledge of those revolutionary intrigues which, as he was
beginning to understand, had surrounded his childhood, and, as he was
beginning to fear, had cost his mother her reason and his father both
liberty and life. Thus did the ship of poor Dominic's fate appear to be
stranded or ever it had fairly set sail at all.

Meanwhile, if London claimed him, she did so in very cynical fashion,
mocking his willingness to labour, refusing to feed him even while she
refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him--his youth,
his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving
definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present
whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands and
feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic colourless
face, his ready yet reticent speech--all these marked him as unusual and
exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer of labour--of
whatever sort--has, it must be conceded, but little use. He is half
afraid, half contemptuous of it, instinctively disliking anything more
alert and alive than his own most stolid self. But while men, distrusting
the distinctness of his personality and his good looks, refused to give
Dominic work, women, relishing them, were only too ready to give him
enjoyment--of a kind. The boy, in those solitary wanderings, ran the
gauntlet of many temptations; and was presented--did he care to accept