it
comes."

"Fit?" asked the newcomer.

The policeman shook his head.

"He was seen to stagger and fall, and by the time I arrived he'd snuffed
out. Heart disease, I suppose."

"Ah!" said Constable Wiseman, regarding the body with a proprietorial
and professional eye, and retailed his own experiences of similar
tragedies, not without pride, as though he had to some extent the
responsibility for their occurrence.

On the far side of the square a young man and a girl were walking
slowly. A tall, fair, good-looking youth he was, who might have
attracted attention even in a crowd. But more likely would that
attention have been focused, had he been accompanied by the girl at his
side, for she was by every standard beautiful. They reached the corner
of Tabor Street, and it was the fixed and eager stare of a little man
who stood on the corner of the street and the intensity of his gaze
which first directed their attention to the tragedy on the opposite side
of the square.

The little man who watched was dressed in an ill-fitting frock coat,
trousers which seemed too long, since they concertinaed over his boots,
and a glossy silk hat set at the back of his head.

"What a funny old thing!" said Frank Merrill under his breath, and the
girl smiled.

The object of their amusement turned sharply as they came abreast of
him. His freckled, clean-shaven face looked strangely old, and the big,
gold-rimmed spectacles bridged halfway down his nose added to his
ludicrous appearance. He raised his eyebrows and surveyed the two young
people.

"There's an accident over there," he said briefly and without any
preliminary.

"Indeed," said the young man politely.

"There have been several accidents in Gray Square," said the strange old
man meditatively. "There was one in 1875, when the corner house--you can
see the end of it from here--collapsed and buried fourteen people, seven
of whom were killed, four of whom were injured for life, and three of
whom escaped with minor injuries."

He said this calmly and apparently without any sense that he was acting
at all unconventionally in volunteering the information, and went on:

"There was another accident in 1881, on the seventeenth of October, a
collision between two hansom cabs which resulted in the death of a
driver whose name was Samuel Green. He lived at 14 Portington Mews, and
had a wife and nine children."

The girl looked at the old man with a little apprehension, and Fra