it--with the freedom of the city on very liberal lines. Happily, inherent
cleanliness of nature saved him from much; and reverent shame at the
thought of entering the hushed and silent house where his mother lived--
spotless, amid pathetic memories and delicate dreams--with the soil of
licence upon him, saved him from more. Crime might have come close to him
in his childhood, but vice never; and the influences of vice are far more
insidious, and consequently more damaging, than those of crime.

Still, one way and another, the boy came very near touching the confines
of despair. Then the tide rose and the stranded ship of his fate began to
lift a little. By means of a series of accidents--the illness of his
former school-fellow, the already mentioned George Lovegrove, whose post
he offered temporarily to fill--he drifted into connection with the
banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking. There his knowledge
of modern languages, his industry, and a certain discreet aloofness
commended him to his superiors. A minor clerkship fell vacant; it was
offered to him. And from thenceforth, for Dominic Iglesias, the monotony
of fixed routine and steady labour, until the day when, as a man of past
fifty, restless and somewhat distrustful both of the present and the
future, he watched the dying of the sullen sunset over Trimmer's Green
from the windows of the first-floor sitting-room of Cedar Lodge.




CHAPTER II


That which had in point of fact happened was not, as Iglesias felt,
without a pretty sharp edge of irony. For to-day, London, so long his