"You could have saved yourself so much," she said regretfully, "if you had kept your promise to come and see me.
"I could not," he answered. "I lost your address. It went into the Thames with an old coat the very night I reached London. But for that I should have come and begged from you."
"You would have made me famous," she answered laughing. "I should have claimed the merit of discovering you."
He looked puzzled.
"Of course you know," she said, "how every one has been reading those wonderful articles of yours in the Courier? You are very fortunate. You have made a reputation at one sitting."
He shook his head.
"A fleeting one, I am afraid. I can understand those articles seeming lifelike. You see I wrote them almost literally with my blood. It was my last effort. I was starving, poisoned with horrors, sick to death of the brutality of life."
"Things had gone so hardly with you then?" she murmured.
He nodded.
"From the first. I came to London as an adventurer, it is true. I knew no one, and I had no money. But the editor of the Ibex had written me kindly, had accepted a story and asked for more. Yet when I went to see him he seemed to have forgotten or repented. He would not give me a hearing. Even the story he had accepted he told me he could not use for a long time—and I was relying upon the money for that. That was the beginning of my ill-luck, and afterwards it never left me."