ere."
Colwyn uttered these last words in a lower tone at the sight of two
office girls descending the staircase with much chatter and laughter.

"Let us go then."

They travelled by 'bus from Grays Inn Road as far as Oxford Circus, and
walked along a number of quiet secluded streets--the backwaters of the
West End--in order to reach Sherryman Street from the lower end, which,
with a true sense of the fitness of things, was called Sherryman Street
Approach. If the Approach had not been within a stone's throw of
Sherryman Square it might have been called a slum. It had tenement
houses with swarms of squalid children playing in the open doorways, its
shops offered East End food--mussels and whelks, "two-eyed steaks,"
reeking fish-and-chips, and horsemeat for the cheap foreign element.
There were several public-houses with groups of women outside drinking
and gossiping, all wearing the black shawls which are as emblematic of
the lower class London woman as a chasuble to a priest, or a blue
tattooed upper lip to a high-caste Maori beauty. A costermonger hawked
frozen rabbits from a donkey-cart, with a pallid woman following behind
to drive away the mangy cats which quarrelled in the road for the oozing
blood which dripped from the cart's tail. An Italian woman, swarthy,
squat, and intolerably dirty, ground out the "Marseillaise" from a
barrel-organ with a shivering monkey capering atop, waving a small Union
Jack, and impatiently rattling a tin can for coppers.

To turn from this squalid quarter into Sherryman Street was to pass from
the east to the west end of London at a step. It was as though an
invisible line of demarcation had been drawn between the lower and upper
portion of the street, and held inviolate by the residents of each
portion. There were no public houses or fish-shops in Sherryman Street;
no organ-grinders, costermongers, unclean children, or women in black
shawls. It had quiet, seclusion, clean pavements, polished doorknockers,
and white curtains at the windows of its well-kept houses, which grew in
dignity to the semblance of town mansions at the Square end.

Number 10 showed a blank closed stone exterior to the passer-by, like an
old grey secretive face. As they approached it Colwyn, with a slight
movement of his head, drew his companion's attention to the upper
windows which belonged to Nepcote's flat. The blinds were down.

"It looks as if Nepcote left last night," he said.

The sight of the drawn