must have detected something strange in this unusual lack
of cordiality. But men are seldom close observers in such matters,
and Jim was full of his own interests, his own projects, his own wild
senseless infatuation.

He watched her round her homeward turn, and then started off at a
quick pace in an opposite direction. With all his cunning he would
never have suspected that Dorothea, whose intellect he considered
little better than an idiot's, could presume to dog his footsteps; and
the contempt he entertained for her--of which she was beginning to be
uncomfortably conscious--no doubt facilitated this unhappy creature's
operations.

Overhead the sky was dark and lowering, the air thick as before
thunder; and though the gaslights streamed on every street in London,
it was an evening well suited to watch an unsuspecting person
unobserved.

Dorothea, returning on her footsteps, kept Jim carefully in sight,
walking from twenty to fifty yards behind him, and as much as possible
on the other side of the street. There was no danger of her losing
him. She could have followed that figure--to her the type of
comeliness and manhood--all over the world; but she dreaded, with a
fear that was almost paralysing, the possibility of his turning back
and detecting that he was tracked. "He'd murder me, for sure," thought
Dorothea, trembling in every limb. Nevertheless, the love that is
strong as death, the jealousy that is cruel as the grave, goaded her
to persevere; and so she flitted in his wake with a noiseless step,
wonderfully gliding and ghostlike considering the solidity of her
proportions.

Jim turned out of Oxford Street to stop at an ill-looking dirty little
house, the door of which seemed to open to him of its own accord. She
spied a small grocer's shop nearly opposite not yet shut up. To dodge
rapidly in and sit down for a few minutes while she cheapened a couple
of ounces of tea, afforded Dorothea an excellent chance of watching
his further movements unseen.

He emerged again almost immediately with a false beard and a pair of
spectacles, carrying a large parcel carefully wrapped in oiled silk;
then, after looking warily up and down the street, turned into the
main thoroughfare for the chase to begin once more.

"He must be dreadful hot, poor Jim!" thought Dorothea, pitying him in
spite of herself for his false beard and heavy parcel, while she wiped
away the drops already beginning to pour off her own forehead.