“You surprise me very much indeed,” Mr. Miller admitted.  “Under the circumstances, it is scarcely to be wondered at that he is out of employment.  Old Waddington wouldn’t have much use for a man like that.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Mr. Lynn remarked thoughtfully, “if it was through my affair that he got the sack.  Couldn’t you do something for him, Mr. Miller—­to oblige me, eh?”

“If he calls again,” Mr. Miller promised, “I will do my best.”

But Burton did not call again.  He made various efforts to obtain a situation in other directions, without the slightest result.  Then he gave it up.  He became a wanderer about London, one of her children who watched her with thoughtful eyes at all times and hours of the day and night.  He saw the pink dawn glimmer through the trees in St. James’s Park.  He saw the bridges empty, the smoke-stained buildings deserted by their inhabitants, with St. Paul’s in the background like a sentinel watching over the sleeping world.  He heard the crash and roar of life die away and he watched like an anxious prophet while the city slept.  He looked upon the stereotyped horrors of the Embankment, vitalized and actual to him now in the light of his new understanding.  He wandered with the first gleam of light among the flower-beds of the Park, sniffing with joy at the late hyacinths, revelling in the cool, sweet softness of the unpolluted air.  Then he listened to the awakening, to the birth of the day.  He heard it from the bridges, from London Bridge and Westminster Bridge, over which thundered the great vans fresh from the country, on their way to Covent Garden.  He stood in front of the Mansion House and watched the thin, black stream of the earliest corners grow into a surging, black-coated torrent.  There were things which made him sorry and there were things which made him glad.  On the whole, however, his isolated contemplation of what for so long he had taken as a matter of course depressed him.  Life was unutterably and intensely selfish.  Every little unit in that seething mass was so entirely, so strangely self-centered.  None of them had any real love or friendliness for the millions who toiled around them, no one seemed to have time to take his eyes from his own work and his own interests.  Burton became more and more depressed as the days passed.  Then he closed his eyes and tried an antidote.  He abandoned this study of his fellow-creatures and plunged once more into the museums, sated himself with the eternal beauties, and came out to resume his place amid the tumultuous throng with rested nerves and a beatific smile upon his lips.  It mattered so little, his welfare of to-day or to-morrow—­whether he went hungry or satisfied to bed!  The other things were in his heart.  He saw the truth.

One day he met his late employer.  Mr. Waddington was not, in his way, an ill-natured man, and he stopped short upon the pavement.  Burton’s new suit was not wearing well.  It showed signs of exposure to the weather.  The young man himself was thin and pale.  It was not for Mr. Waddington to appreciate the soft brilliance of his eyes, the altered curves of his lips.  From his intensely practical point of view, his late employee was certainly in low water.