But his lordship deigned no reply. He told the coachman to arrange for the removal of the carriage, grasped his niece by the arm and led her, still protesting, into the house.
The policeman saw the bundle of papers scattered over the roadway, and, near them, the partly-eaten bun. After a wrench at his garments he produced a penny.
"Here," he said to the boy. "Buy another bun and be off. It's a good job for you the young lady spoke up the way she did."
"She merely told the truth. That man was a liar."
Refusing the proffered penny, the boy turned on his heel. The policeman looked after him.
"That's a queer kid," he thought. "Talked like a regular young gent. I wonder why he is selling papers. Poor lad! He lost a bob's worth at least, and small thanks he got for it."
Passing out of the square by the first eastward street, Philip Anson, with his head erect and hands clinched in his pockets, strode onward at a rapid pace. The lightning was less frequent now, and the thunder was dying away in sullen rumblings. He was wet and hungry. Yet, although he had three halfpence, the remaining balance of the only sales effected that evening, he passed many shops where he could have bought food.
In Piccadilly, where the cessation of the storm created a rush of traffic, he was nearly run over, by reason of his own carelessness, and received a slash from a whip, accompanied by a loud oath from an angry cabman. He shivered, but never even looked around. Crossing Trafalgar Square, he plunged through the vortex of vehicles without troubling to avoid them in the slightest degree. Once the hot breath of a pair of van horses touched his cheek while a speechless driver pulled them back onto their haunches. Again, the off-wheel of an omnibus actually grazed his heel as he sped behind the statue of Charles the First.
At last he reached the comparative seclusion of the Embankment, and stood for a moment to gaze fixedly at the swirling, glinting river.
"Not here," he muttered, aloud. "I must be nearer to mother—dear old mother! She is there, waiting for me."