and before we had gone far, Mr. Parsons stopped at a tobacconist's shop,
and, giving me a half-crown, told me to buy a threepenny packet of
cigarettes.

It was a shop of a better class than any he had sent me into before,
and, placing the coin on the counter, I asked for what I had been
ordered to buy. But the man behind the counter seized upon the
half-crown at once.

'That looks to me like a bad one,' he cried, gazing into my face, and I
suppose that my heightened colour, or some expression of guilty
knowledge, told him that I knew that as well as he did. Placing the rim
of the coin in a metal niche on the edge of the counter, he easily broke
the false half-crown into two pieces, which he flung into my face. One
of them hit my left cheek a little painfully.

'Now be off and never show your face here again,' he shouted, 'or I will
have you locked up.'

Without a word, although my blood was boiling, and I had never been
spoken to in this way before, I hung my head and walked out of the shop.

As soon as I reached the street, Mr. Parsons seized my arm as usual.

'Change!' he said.

'I have not got it,' I answered.

'How's that?' he sharply snapped out.

'The man said the half-crown was bad, and broke it in halves,' I
exclaimed, and gripping me more tightly Mr. Parsons quickened his pace
and turned aside down the first street on our right.

I felt that he was eyeing me significantly as we went, and my thoughts
were busy in an attempt to determine the wisest line of action. Perhaps
my circumstances were making me artful, and it is true that I felt
convinced that my escape could only be accomplished by strategy.

It may appear that nothing would have been more simple than to free
myself, especially as I spent some hours in the public streets every
day. Now that I look back on those days from a position of safety, I
even wonder whether a little more resolution, a little more courage,
might have earlier put an end to my difficult position. Surely it must
have been possible to have wrenched my arm from Parsons' grasp, and he
would not have dared to raise the hue and cry after me, or do anything
to attract attention to himself. Or I might have appealed to any
policeman for protection, or to a passer-by, and so have shaken off my
tormentor.

Perhaps some such attempt might have succeeded, but unfortunately a
potent factor in my case was the terror with which in some way Mr.
Parsons still succeeded in inspiring me.