on and brought no tidings of the robbers or the stolen
property. I was very much distressed over the whole affair, and my
neighbours tried to comfort me by telling me that I could afford the
loss, and that it was a good job it had not happened to a poorer man.
How did they know I could afford the loss, or that I was not utterly
ruined? I had never posed as a wealthy man--I was not wealthy, in the
strict sense of the term. I had been only careful, I had spent nothing
in waste, and I _had_ put by a little money for a rainy day. If people
in Bermondsey called me a money-grubber, it was no fault of my own; but
there were a few who did, because I held to the strict letter of the law
in my contracts. That was praiseworthy, but they could not see it. I
believe a few of them were actually glad that I had been robbed.

[Illustration: "HE WAS VERY LAME."]

Some six months after the burglary, in the dusk of an early winter's
afternoon, a tall, sunken-cheeked man, with a huge white moustache and
a vermilion face, which seemed put on expressly to show it up by, came
limping into my shop at Bermondsey. He was very lame, or pretended to
be, I thought, to throw me off my guard. As if I, Edwin Kippen, was
likely to be off guard in business hours, as if it were possible to be
off one's guard and get one's living, Bermondsey way.

I told my apprentice, who was behind the counter polishing up a few
window goods for next Saturday, to light up, though there was quite
half-an-hour's daylight left in the street. But, somehow--such is
instinct--I did not like the get-up of this man. I had never seen him
before; he did not look "made in Bermondsey," and he was seedy, and a
little nervous, though he talked in strident tones, in a Sir Anthony
Absolute kind of manner, which made the gas glasses jingle.

"Do you buy articles outright, Mr. Kippen, as well as lend money on
them?" he asked abruptly as he entered.

"Yes, sir, I do."

"And at a fair price?"

"Certainly. May I ask what----"

But he was an impetuous man, and so full of his own mission, that he did
not wait for me to conclude my inquiry.

[Illustration: "MY APPRENTICE."]

"Then what will you give me for this article, money down?" he asked,
producing from his pocket, to my complete astonishment, the identical
little carriage clock, all dials and complications and internal
irregularities, which I had hidden in my piano before going down to
Brisket's farm--the clock that had been s