"But how did it end?" asked Charles.
"Well," said the speaker, "General Mainwaring came up, and laid his hand on Lord Welter's shoulder, and took him off pretty quiet. And that's all I know about it."
It was clearly all. Charles rose to go, and walked by himself from street to street, thinking.
Suppose he was to be thrown against Lord Welter, how should he act? what should he say? Truly it was a puzzling question. The anomaly of his position was never put before him more strikingly than now. What could he say? what could he do?
After the first shock, the thought of Adelaide's unfaithfulness was not so terrible as on the first day or two; many little unamiable traits of character, vanity, selfishness, and so on, unnoticed before, began to come forth in somewhat startling relief. Anger, indignation, and love, all three jumbled up together, each one by turns in the ascendant, were the frames of mind in which Charles found himself when he began thinking about her. One moment he was saying to himself, "How beautiful she was!" and the next, "She was as treacherous as a tiger; she never could have cared for me." But, when he came to think of Welter, his anger overmastered everything, and he would clench his teeth as he walked along, and for a few moments feel the blood rushing to his head and singing in his ears. Let us hope that Lord Welter will not come across him while he is in that mood, or there will be mischief.
But his anger was soon over. He had just had one of these fits of anger as he walked along; and he was, like a good fellow, trying to conquer it, by thinking of Lord Welter as he was as a boy, and before he was a villain, when he came before St. Peter's Church, in Eaton Square, and stopped to look at some fine horses which were coming out of Salter's.
At the east end of St. Peter's Church there is a piece of bare white wall in a corner, and in front of the wall was a little shoeblack.
He was not one of the regular brigade, with a red shirt, but an "Arab" of the first water. He might have been seven or eight years old, but was small. His whole dress consisted of two garments; a ragged shirt, with no buttons, and half of one sleeve gone, and a ragged pair of trousers, which, small as he was, were too small for him, and barely reached below his knees. His feet and head were bare; and under a wild, tangled shock of hair looked a pretty, dirty, roguish face, with a pair of grey, twinkling eyes, which was amazingly comical. Charles stopped, watching him, and, as he did so, felt what we have most of us felt, I dare say—that, at certain times of vexation and anger, the company and conversation of children is the best thing for us.
The little man was playing at fives against the bare wall, with such tremendous energy, that he did not notice that Charles had stopped, and was looking at him. Every nerve in his wiry, lean little body was braced up to the game; his heart and soul were as deeply enlisted in it, as though he were captain of the eleven, or stroke of the eight.
He had no ball to play with, but he played with a brass button. The button flew hither and thither, being so irregular in shape, and the boy dashed after it like lightning. At last, after he had kept up five-and-twenty or so, the button flew over his head, and lighted at Charles's feet.