courtin' of her
then. You owes her more than one good turn now, or I'm mistaken!"

"Who the devil are you?" asked Tom, startled, and with reason; yet
conscious, in his dark, dreary despair, of a vague glimmer, bearing
the same relation to hope that a will-o'-the-wisp does to the light on
our hearth at home.

The man looked about him. That narrow street was deserted but for
themselves.

He stared in Tom's face with a certain desperate frankness. "I'll tell
ye who I am," said he; "if you an' me is to go in for this job, as
true pals, let's have no secrets between us, an' bear no malice. They
call me 'Gentleman Jim,' Mr. Ryfe, that's what they call me. I'm the
man as hocussed you that there arternoon, down Westminster way. I was
set on to that job, I was. Set on by _her_. I squeezed hard, I know.
All in the way o' business. But I might have squeezed _harder_, Mr.
Ryfe. You should think o' that!"

"You infernal scoundrel!" exclaimed Tom, yet in a tone neither so
astonished nor so indignant as his informant expected. "If you had,
you'd have been hanged for murder. Well, it's not _you_ I ought to
blame. What have you got to say? You can help me--I see it in your
face. Out with it. You speak to a man as desperate as yourself."

"I knowed it!" exclaimed the other. "When you come out o' that there
house, I seen it in the way as you slammed to that there door. Says I,
there's the man as I wants, an' the man as wants me! I follered you
this mornin' from your hotel, an' a precious job I had keepin' up with
your hansom, though the driver, as works by times with a pal o' mine,
he kep' on easy when he could. I watched of the house, ah! an hour an'
more, an' I never turned my head away but to get a drop o' beer from a
lad as I sent round to the Grapes for a quart. Bless ye! I hadn't but
just emptied the pot, when I see a lady--the very moral of her as we
knows on--pops round the corner into Oxford Street. I was in two minds
whether to foller, but thinks I, it's Mr. Ryfe as I'm a-lookin' for,
an' if it _was_ she, we couldn't trap her now, not in a crowded place
like that. Besides, I see a servant-gal takin' home the beer drop her
a curtsey as she went by. No, it couldn't be my lady; but if so be as
you an' me is of the same mind, Mr. Ryfe, my lady shall be safe in a
cage afore this time to-morrow, and never a man to keep the key but
yourself, Mr. Ryfe, if you'll only be guided by a true friend."

"Who set you on to this?" asked T