"Yes! I brought you--I found you unconscious. But there is One who will bring you safe into the fold."
"I wonder if you would--be kind enough to let me--die alone."
"Alone!" echoed Morris Pugh. "You can never be alone. And even for this world, would you not like us to call your friends--to let them know?"
"I--I have my friends," he answered; "I want--nothing."
So after whispering about him regretfully, they left him for a while, and he lay staring at a ray of sunlight which slanted through the window at the further end of the ward, and fell, in a golden glory, upon an empty bed. If it had only fallen upon his!
Gold! Yes! everything was gold in this world. How people fought for it, selling their souls, their bodies for it! yet how little it meant. A hideous mockery, indeed, was this Christian greed of gold. And yet money meant much--Ted--damn him!
"Mate," came a voice from the next bed, where a tramp, hollow-eyed, unshaven, who was recovering from an attack of pneumonia, had lain listening, coughing. "'Tain't no business o' mine in a way, but there ain't no good your lyin' an' damnin' a man as ain't done you no 'arm. 'Tain't in a way fair on you for me ter let you go to 'ell over a lie. It's the rumm'est start as I sh'ud be 'ere, but--ye see, Ted--'ooever 'e may be--didn't take that 'undred--I took it."
"You!" he said faintly.
"Me!" echoed the tramp. "It's--it's the rumm'est start; but--you see I was on the lay atwixt Blackborough an' Liverpool. Outer-work-an'-emigration lay it 'twas, an' not a bad one in the summer time, for them Welsh is generous. I was asleep in the gorse close by when you two come by an' smashed. Then you begun shieing the shiners about, an' I waited thinkin' to get some of 'em out after you'd gone. An' I did too, what with bein' able to dive. But there! The 'ole thing wasn't much worth; not more than one good drunk, an' then it was over. But don't you go a-lyin' an' damnin' the wrong fellar. It was me, not 'im; so curse me an' welcome if it do you any good."
He rolled over on his pillow, and said no more.