little help.

He thanked me profusely when I consented to go with him.

"Ah, signor padrone!" he said gratefully, "she will be so delighted. It
is so very good of you."

We hailed a hansom and drove across Westminster Bridge to the address he
gave--a gloomy back street off the York Road, one of those narrow, grimy
thoroughfares into which the sun never shines. Ah, how often do the poor
Italians, those children of the sun, pine and die when shut up in our
dismal, sordid streets! Dirt and squalor do not affect them; it is the
damp and cold and lack of sunshine that so very soon proves fatal.

A low-looking, evil-faced fellow opened the door to us and growled
acquaintance with Olinto, who, striking a match, ascended the worn,
carpetless stairs before me, apologizing for passing before me, and
saying in Italian--

"We live at the top, signore, because it is cheaper and the air is
better."

"Quite right," I said. "Quite right. Go on." And I thought I heard my
cab driving away.

It was a gloomy, forbidding, unlighted place into which I would
certainly have hesitated to enter had not my companion been my trusted
servant. I instinctively disliked the look of the fellow who had opened
the door. He was one of those hulking loafers of the peculiarly Lambeth
type. Yet the alien poor, I recollected, cannot choose where they shall