Kingsley—grew and grew until he longed to do something. He had only as yet said, "Thank you, sir;" but now he longed to show his gratitude in a more fitting way. So thought the "twinses," too, for Bob said presently—

"Father, shouldn't I just like to do something nice for that gentleman! I wonder whether you're like to see him again?"

"In course, lad. I shall often see him pass, I'll never forget him; but it's not so likely as he'll remember me. Got summat better to do, I reckon. Yes; he'll come most days, seeing as he's a 'season.' But, there—you're right! I don't feel as if I shall be able to rest until I've done 'summat nice for him,' as you says, if it's only to carry his bag for nothing. But summat bigger nor that would ease me more. What a rale gent he is, to be sure!"

There was no disguising the tears that stood in Gull's eyes now; and strange to say, he did not try to hide from his "little lads" that they were there.

He made the boys put their feet, now so stoutly booted, in a row upon the fender. How the brass tips shone in the firelight! And there was such a jolly noise when the heels knocked against the floor! Bob made the grand discovery that he could dance a hornpipe. And his sturdy feet careered over the floor, clattering, tapping, and jumping, until the quiet Tom was roused into clapping and "hurrahing" with delight.

His "act of irregular charity," as he called it, quickly faded from Mr. Kingsley's mind—so quickly, too, that when one of the outside porters occasionally helped him more readily than usual, or seemed less eager for the accustomed "tip," he never thought that it might have any connection with that Christmas Eve adventure. He was short-sighted, too, and not very quick to recognize faces. He did not know that as he passed out of the station every morning, Gull's eyes followed him with a pleasant remembering look, that Gull's hand was always ready to throw back the doors of the hansom if the day was wet and he drove, and that Gull's feet were swift to carry their owner away before the accustomed "coppers" could be offered.

The first question that always greeted Gull when he got home to his boys in the evening was, from Bob—

"Did you see our gentleman to-day, father?" echoed by Tom's eager—

"Did you, father?"

A year had nearly passed away. Christmas was coming again, this time dressed in a mantle of thick, choking fog and biting frost. The days seemed to be turned into night. People and things looked queerly distorted and unnaturally large. The street lamps tried to pierce the gloom all day with foolish, blinking eyes; and every one took his full measure of grumbling.

One evening Mr. Kingsley hurried up the steps to Waterloo Junction with a feeling of relief that the unknown perils of the gloomy streets were safely past. He pushed his way through a little group of idlers near one of the doors, and was turning towards the booking-office, when he was startled by a violent commotion close behind him. He turned to find two men—both tall, but one powerful and thick-set, the other meagre and ill-clad—engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle.

His first impulse was to continue his way and leave them to fight it out.

"It is some wretched, drunken tramp," he said to himself. But a second look showed him that there was too much desperate method on the part of both for this to be the case; and he was looking round for a policeman to interpose the "stern arm of the law," when the struggle was ended as abruptly as it had begun.

The stronger man of the two suddenly flung his antagonist from him with an angry oath, and then disappeared in the fog. He left the other lying almost at Mr. Kingsley's feet—flung there upon his back, with one hand hidden beneath him. He lay motionless as death, silenced by the force with which his head had struck the ground. His white face and closed eyes sent a quick fear to Mr. Kingsley's kindly heart as he bent over him, and he turned to the two porters who hurried up, to say—

"The man's terribly hurt, I'm afraid. There was a quarrel, and he was thrown down."

While one of the men answered him the other stooped down to look at the prostrate figure, and then started to his feet again, crying—

"Mate—it's Gull! It's Gull, I tell you! What does it mean?"

With the help of the policeman, who appeared at this moment, and watched by the usual curious crowd of onlookers, they bathed Gull's face with cold water, forced brandy between his lips, and chafed his cold hands. Then it was that they discovered, tightly clasped in the hand upon which he had been lying, a folded leather case. The policeman unbent the convulsive fingers, and examined this with careful eyes.

"However did Gull get hold of this, I wonder?" was his exclamation.

Mr. Kingsley looked at it with a puzzled expression. It had a strange resemblance to his own pocket-book! Thrusting his hand hurriedly into his various pockets proved to him, without a doubt, that his it was indeed. And a few words were sufficient to convince the policeman of his right to claim it.

But here a sudden movement from Gull turned all eyes towards him once more.

He raised himself to a sitting position, and with one hand to his poor dazed head, gazed with dim, half-unconscious eyes at the other held before him—wide open and empty!

As he gazed, a bitter cry escaped his lips.

"Then the brute has made off with it, after all!"

This, you see, was the way in which Gull "eased himself," as he expressed it, and satisfied the demands that gratitude made upon his honest heart.

I have very little more to tell you, and that you could almost guess for yourself.

Gull spent a few quiet days on his bed, attended devotedly by his little lads, who were much over-awed at father's "bein' took bad," and filled with wide-eyed wonder when "our gentleman" climbed the old staircase more than once, to see how father was, and to provide for him some new comfort.

Once again, two versions of a true story were told in two separate homes. It was the version that the "twinses" heard which was the shortest in the telling.

"Tell us all about it, father," said Bob, when Gull was "rested" enough to talk to his boys.

"Nay, lad, there ain't much to tell. I just collared the thief as he was making off with Mr. Kingsley's pocket-book, and he didn't like it somehow, and threw me down. But that's all about it."

"Oh! but you got the pocket-book from him first, you know, father."

"Ay! I did that," Gull answered, with a smile; and there the telling of the story ended. I don't know when the acting of it will be finished, for there was a difference in the lives of Gull and his "twinses" from that day forward—"all along of Mr. Kingsley's kindness," as they would tell you; but "because I have found an honest man," as Mr. Kingsley himself would say to little Patsy.