fter his game is as wily as the fox himself. Men do not talk
at the covert side--or at any rate they ought not. And they should
stand together discreetly at the non-running side. All manner of
wiles and silences and discretions are necessary, though too often
broken through by the uninstructed,--much to their own discomfort.
And so in hunting his fox, Mr. Prendergast did not dash up loudly
into the covert, but discreetly left his cab at the church of St.
Botolph's.

Spinny Lane, when at last found by intelligence given to him at the
baker's,--never in such unknown regions ask a lad in the street, for
he invariably will accompany you, talking of your whereabouts very
loudly, so that people stare at you, and ask each other what can
possibly be your business in those parts. Spinny Lane, I say, was not
the sort of locality that he had expected. He knew the look of the
half-protected, half-condemned Alsatias of the present-day rascals,
and Spinny Lane did not at all bear their character. It was a street
of small new tenements, built, as yet, only on one side of the
way, with the pavement only one third finished, and the stones in
the road as yet unbroken and untrodden. Of such streets there are
thousands now round London. They are to be found in every suburb,
creating wonder in all thoughtful minds as to who can be their
tens of thousands of occupants. The houses are a little too good
for artisans, too small and too silent to be the abode of various
lodgers, and too mean for clerks who live on salaries. They are as
dull-looking as Lethe itself, dull and silent, dingy and repulsive.
But they are not discreditable in appearance, and never have that
Mohawk look which by some unknown sympathy in bricks and mortar
attaches itself to the residences of professional ruffians.

Number seven he found to be as quiet and decent a house as any in
the row, and having inspected it from a little distance he walked up
briskly to the door, and rang the bell. He walked up briskly in order
that his advance might not be seen; unless, indeed, as he began to
think not impossible, Aby's statement was altogether a hoax.

"Does a woman named Mrs. Mary Swan live here?" he asked of a
decent-looking young woman of some seven or eight and twenty, who
opened the door for him. She was decent looking, but poverty stricken
and wan with work and care, and with that heaviness about her which
perpetual sorrow always gives. Otherwise she would not have been i