Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/118

 him considerably lower in the scale of respectability than a decently-brought-up dog, but in one respect at least he would not have suffered by comparison with a dog. Though he only dimly grasped what it meant, he had never forgotten the one kindness that had been done him during the course of his sordid and degraded existence, and so it happened that, in the weird arrangement of human things, he was able to repay it with magnificent interest.

Of course he knew of the sale of the claim. His new master had treated him firmly but still with no approach to brutality, and he had no taste to change his service for that of Macadam or Grünstein. The first thing he did on receiving his dismissal, and the last of his wages, was to go and have a drink of Cape Smoke, and it seemed as though some occult virtue in that commonly fatal fluid kindled somewhere within the recesses of his