of the gentleman
whose movements were daily becoming of more and more interest to me.
For set it down to caprice--and men are often as capricious as women--or
account for it as you will, his restlessness at this period was truly
remarkable. Not a day that he did not spend his time in walking the
streets, and that not in his usual aimless gentlemanly fashion, but
eagerly and with an intent gaze that roamed here and there, like a bird
seeking its prey. It would often be as late as five o'clock before he
came in, and if, as now frequently happened, he did not have company to
dinner, he was even known to start out again after seven o'clock and go
over the same ground as in the morning, looking with strained gaze, that
vainly endeavored to appear unconcerned, into the faces of the women
that he passed. I not unfrequently followed him at these times as much
for my own amusement as from any hope I had of coming upon anything that
should aid me in the work before me. But when he suddenly changed his
route of travel from a promenade in the fashionable thoroughfares of
Broadway and Fourteenth Street to a walk through Chatham Square and the
dark, narrow streets of the East side, I began to scent whom the prey
might be that he was seeking, and putting every other consideration
aside, regularly set myself to dog his steps, as only I, with my
innumerable disguises, knew how to do. For three separate days I kept at
his heels wherever he went, each day growing more and more astonished
if not to say hopeful, as I found myself treading the narrowest and most
disreputable streets of the city; halting at the shops of pawnbrokers;
peering into the back-rooms of liquor shops; mixing with the crowds that
infest the corner groceries at nightfall, and even slinking with hand on
the trigger of the pistol I carried in my pocket, up dark alleys where
every door that swung noiselessly to and fro as we passed, shut upon
haunts of such villainy as only is known to us of the police, or to
those good souls that for the sake of One whose example they follow, lay
aside their fears and sensitiveness to carry light into the dim pits of
this wretched world. At first I thought Mr. Blake might have some such
reason for the peculiar course he took. But his indifference to all
crowds where only men were collected, his silence where a word would
have been well received, convinced me it was a woman he was seeking and
that with an intentness which blinded him to th