he cried, with a sly smile, which told them he knew all about it.
"How did you know?" asked one.
"Who told you?"
"Hugh, that was shabby of you!"
"You girls are always patching up some mystery or other. How was I to know?" said Hugh.
Jack Lever, who was leaning against the table, came over and sat on the settee beside the girls.
"Mark didn't play fair; he never said a word about it till Mat and Hugh had told your secret, so to get even I'll tell you his."
Amid the girls' applause and Mark's protests he commenced.
"You ought to know Phillip Gamer, the first Torchlight, ran away from home when he was twelve to join the Salvation Army. He was a drummer boy in the ranks until a detective, hired by his dad, shadowed him and brought him home, but last year at school he said the Army had helped him to a view of a question which had puzzled him all his life. His mother declared that even as a baby, he had protested in lusty tones against silver-backed hair-brushes and perfumed soaps, and when the nurse perambulated him in the park, a bunch of ragged, barefoot kids would surround the beaming youngster in his silk-lined carriage. There might be a dozen other baby vehicles round, which they wouldn't think of touching, nor of speaking to those tony babies, but they seemed to overlook Phil's frills and laces and took to him like brothers.
"At school he refused one of the high-priced rooms, because it would separate him in a way from the boys he wished most to meet, the boys who thought things out for themselves. Phil's coming knocked out that feeling,—a sort of caste—which divided the rich scholars from the poor; his room was a meeting point—the plane upon which they became fellow-men. Here the Torchlights came into being. Our counter-sign, The Brotherhood of Man, and though there was only one of us who intended to work as a minister in the slums, each was pledged to individual effort in his own locality.