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From time to time Roberto would glance at a pocket watch placed upon the table amidst his papers. Then he would get up and pace for a while up and down the room. Through the window he could see tattered, filthy women moving about in the galleries of the houses across the way; up from the street rose a deafening racket of cries from the huckstresses and the peddlers.

Roberto, however, was not at all disturbed by the continuous din, and after a short while would resume his seat and continue writing.

In the meantime Manuel was climbing and descending every stairway in the neighbourhood, in search of Roberto Hasting.

Manuel was inspired with the earnest resolution to change his mode of living; he felt capable now of embracing an energetic determination and carrying it through to the end.

His elder sister, who had just married a fireman, had presented him with a pair of torn trousers that her husband had discarded, an old jacket and a frayed muffler. To these she had added a cap of most absurd shape and colour, a battered derby and a few vague bits of good advice concerning industriousness, which, as everyone knows, is the father of all virtues, just as the horse is the noblest of animals and idleness the mother of all vice.