ON a morning in May two men were strolling in the new sunshine of London along Piccadilly. One was elderly and brown, with a skin resembling parchment, keen and piercing eyes, a wizened figure that had been always small and that now began to shrink, and hair and beard flecked with white. The other was a tall and straight boy of about twenty-three, with fine features, large blue eyes, and very thick and smooth hair, dark brown in color and growing low 011 his forehead. The boy was very well dressed in the height of the fashion, and had something of the conventional, and yet elaborate aspect of the true dandy. The elderly man, on the other hand, had a baggy appearance. His suit had come from a good tailor, but it had apparently suffered an irretrievable collapse on first perceiving its wearer, and, unable to recover, it now hung about his figure dejectedly, and gave itself to the breeze or to the dust in a manner so abandoned as almost to suggest impropriety. It were impossible to find in all London two men whose aspects more plainly hinted that they were unsuitable companions. If their mere modes of dress showed a strong difference between them, this was emphasized by the expressions, wary and unwavering, of their eyes, by their strangely dissimilar gaits, even by their hands and by the manner in which they held their walking-canes. The elderly man grasped his firmly with thin and crooked fingers, and struck it sharply upon the pavement as he shuffled on-wards. The young man held his lightly, almost frivolously, in the way of a hundred other young men who passed them by, going to clubs or to the Park. Many of these young men nodded to him gaily. Some glanced at his companion, but no one seemed to know him.
