One jacket, one shirt, one muffler, a pair of trousers, a pair of socks, a pair of boots, one cap, one tooth-brush, and a rosary.  There was absolutely nothing else.  Even his razor was gone.

Things, therefore, were pretty bad with him on the morning of the twenty-second of December.  I imagine that he still possessed a few pence, but out of this few pence he had to pay for his own and Gertie’s journey to Chiswick, as well as keep himself alive for another week.  At least, so he must have thought.

It must have been somewhere in Kensington High Street that he first had a hint of a possibility of food to be obtained free, for, although I find it impossible to follow all his movements during these days, it is quite certain that he partook of the hospitality of the Carmelite Fathers on this morning.  He mentions it, with pleasure, in his diary.

It is a very curious and medieval sight—­this feeding of the poor in the little deep passage that runs along the outside of the cloister of the monastery in Church Street.  The passage is approached by a door at the back of the house, opening upon the lane behind, and at a certain hour on each morning of the year is thronged from end to end with the most astonishing and deplorable collection of human beings to be seen in London.  They are of all ages and sizes, from seventeen to seventy, and the one thing common to them all is extreme shabbiness and poverty.

A door opens at a given moment; the crowd surges a little towards a black-bearded man in a brown frock, with an apron over it, and five minutes later a deep silence, broken only by the sound of supping and swallowing, falls upon the crowd.  There they stand, with the roar of London sounding overhead, the hooting of cars, the noise of innumerable feet, and the rain—­at least, on this morning—­falling dismally down the long well-like space.  And here stand between two and three hundred men, pinched, feeble, and yet wolfish, gulping down hot soup and bread, looking something like a herd of ragged prisoners pent in between the high walls.

Here, then, Frank stood in the midst of them, gulping his soup.  His van and horses, strictly against orders, remained in Church Street, under the care of a passer-by, whom Frank seems to have asked, quite openly, to do it for him for God’s sake.

It is a dreary little scene in which to picture him, and yet, to myself, it is rather pleasant, too.  I like to think of him, now for the second time within a few weeks, and all within the first six months of his Catholic life, depending upon his Church for the needs of the body as well as for the needs of the soul.  There was nothing whatever to distinguish him from the rest; he, too, had now something of that lean look that is such a characteristic of that crowd, and his dress, too, was entirely suitable to his company.  He spoke with none of his hosts; he took the basin in silence and gave it back in silence; then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and went out comforted.