een drinking
heavily on the night of his death, and further evidence of the accused's
professional vagabondage and destitution; it was shown, too, that for
some time the archway in Glove Lane had been his favourite night haunt.
He had been committed for trial in January. This time, despite
misgivings, Keith had attended the police court. To his great relief
Larry was not there. But the policeman who had come up while he was
looking at the archway, and given him afterwards that scare in the girl's
rooms, was chief witness to the way the accused man haunted Glove Lane.
Though Keith held his silk hat high, he still had the uncomfortable
feeling that the man had recognised him.

His conscience suffered few, if any, twinges for letting this man rest
under the shadow of the murder. He genuinely believed that there was not
evidence enough to convict; nor was it in him to appreciate the tortures
of a vagabond shut up. The scamp deserved what he had got, for robbing a
dead body; and in any case such a scarecrow was better off in prison than
sleeping out under archways in December. Sentiment was foreign to
Keith's character, and his justice that of those who subordinate the
fates of the weak and shiftless to the needful paramountcy of the strong
and well established.

His daughter came back from school for the Christmas holidays. It was
hard to look up from her bright eyes and rosy cheeks and see this shadow
hanging above his calm and ordered life, as in a glowing room one's eye
may catch an impending patch of darkness drawn like a spider's web across
a corner of the ceiling.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve they went, by her desire, to a church
in Soho, where the Christmas Oratorio was being given; and coming away
passed, by chance of a wrong turning, down Borrow Street. Ugh! How that
startled moment, when the girl had pressed herself against him in the
dark, and her terror-stricken whisper: "Oh! Who is it?" leaped out
before him! Always that business--that ghastly business! After the
trial he would have another try to get them both away. And he thrust his
arm within his young daughter's, hurrying her on, out of this street
where shadows filled all the winter air.

But that evening when she had gone to bed he felt uncontrollably
restless. He had not seen Larry for weeks. What was he about? What
desperations were hatching in his disorderly brain? Was he very
miserable; had he perhaps sunk into a stupor of deb