"Father, shouldn't I just like to do something nice for that gentleman! I wonder whether you're like to see him again?"
"In course, lad. I shall often see him pass, I'll never forget him; but it's not so likely as he'll remember me. Got summat better to do, I reckon. Yes; he'll come most days, seeing as he's a 'season.' But, there—you're right! I don't feel as if I shall be able to rest until I've done 'summat nice for him,' as you says, if it's only to carry his bag for nothing. But summat bigger nor that would ease me more. What a rale gent he is, to be sure!"
There was no disguising the tears that stood in Gull's eyes now; and strange to say, he did not try to hide from his "little lads" that they were there.
He made the boys put their feet, now so stoutly booted, in a row upon the fender. How the brass tips shone in the firelight! And there was such a jolly noise when the heels knocked against the floor! Bob made the grand discovery that he could dance a hornpipe. And his sturdy feet careered over the floor, clattering, tapping, and jumping, until the quiet Tom was roused into clapping and "hurrahing" with delight.
His "act of irregular charity," as he called it, quickly faded from Mr. Kingsley's mind—so quickly, too, that when one of the outside porters occasionally helped him more readily than usual, or seemed less eager for the accustomed "tip," he never thought that it might have any connection with that Christmas Eve adventure. He was short-sighted, too, and not very quick to recognize faces. He did not know that as he passed out of the station every morning, Gull's eyes followed him with a pleasant remembering look, that Gull's hand was always ready to throw back the doors of the hansom if the day was wet and he drove, and that Gull's feet were swift to carry their owner away before the accustomed "coppers" could be offered.
The first question that always greeted Gull when he got home to his boys in the evening was, from Bob—
"Did you see our gentleman to-day, father?" echoed by Tom's eager—
"Did you, father?"
A year had nearly passed away. Christmas was coming again, this time dressed in a mantle of thick, choking fog and biting frost. The days seemed to be turned into night. People and things looked queerly distorted and unnaturally large. The street lamps tried to pierce the gloom all day with foolish, blinking eyes; and every one took his full measure of grumbling.
One evening Mr. Kingsley hurried up the steps to Waterloo Junction with a feeling of relief that the unknown perils of the gloomy streets were safely past. He pushed his way through a little group of idlers near one of the doors, and was turning towards the booking-office, when he was startled by a violent commotion close behind him. He turned to find two men—both tall, but one powerful and thick-set, the other meagre and ill-clad—engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle.