Not my fault!' and to pass on before the
instant had elapsed which was requisite to his recovery of the realities
about him.

When that moment had flashed away, he saw that the man striding on
before him was the man who had been so much in his mind during the last
few days. It was no casual resemblance, helped out by the force of
the impression the man made upon him. It was the man; the man he had
followed in company with the girl, and whom he had overheard talking to
Miss Wade.

The street was a sharp descent and was crooked too, and the man (who
although not drunk had the air of being flushed with some strong drink)
went down it so fast that Clennam lost him as he looked at him. With
no defined intention of following him, but with an impulse to keep the
figure in view a little longer, Clennam quickened his pace to pass the
twist in the street which hid him from his sight. On turning it, he saw
the man no more.

Standing now, close to the gateway of his mother's house, he looked
down the street: but it was empty. There was no projecting shadow large
enough to obscure the man; there was no turning near that he could have
taken; nor had there been any audible sound of the opening and closing
of a door. Nevertheless, he concluded that the man must have had a key
in his hand, and must have opened one of the many house-doors and gone
in.

Ruminating on this strange chance and strange glimpse, he turned into
the court-yard. As he looked, by mere habit, towards the feebly lighted
windows of his mother's room, his eyes encountered the figure he had
just lost, standing against the iron railings of the little waste
enclosure looking up at those windows and laughing to himself. Some of
the many vagrant cats who were always prowling about there by night,
and who had taken fright at him, appeared to have stopped when he had
stopped, and were looking at him with eyes by no means unlike his own
from tops of walls and porches, and other safe points of pause. He had
only halted for a moment to entertain himself thus; he immediately went
forward, throwing the end of his cloak off his shoulder as he went,
ascended the unevenly sunken steps, and knocked a sounding knock at the
door.

Clennam's surprise was not so absorbing but that he took his resolution
without any incertitude. He went up to the door too, and ascended the
steps too. His friend looked at him with a braggart air, and sang to
himself.

'Who passes by this roa