suer, a slim, long-backed, buttoned-up, weazel-faced
policeman. The policeman eyes the tatterdemalion instinctively, then
turns his glance towards the solitary defenceless gentleman in advance,
and walks on, keeping himself between the two. The tatterdemalion
stifles an impatient curse. Be his purpose force, be it only
supplication, be it colloquy of any kind, impossible to fulfil it while
that policeman is there. True that in his powerful hands he could have
clutched that slim, long-backed officer, and broken him in two as a
willow-wand. But that officer is the Personation of Law, and can stalk
through a legion of tatterdemalions as a ferret may glide through a barn
full of rats. The prowler feels he is suspected. Unknown as yet to the
London police, he has no desire to invite their scrutiny. He crosses
the way; he falls back; he follows from afar. The policeman may yet
turn away before the safer streets of the metropolis be gained. No; the
cursed Incarnation of Law, with eyes in its slim back, continues its
slow strides at the heels of the unsuspicious Darrell. The more solitary
defiles are already passed,--now that dim lane, with its dead wall on
one side. By the dead wall skulks the prowler; on the other side still
walks the Law. Now--alas for the prowler!--shine out the throughfares,
no longer dim nor deserted,--Leicester Square, the Haymarket, Pall Mall,
Carlton Gardens; Darrell is at his door. The policeman turns sharply
round. There, at the corner near the learned Club-house, halts the
tatterdemalion. Towards the tatterdemalion the policeman now advances
quickly. The tatterdemalion is quicker still; fled like a guilty
thought.

Back, back, back into that maze of passages and courts, back to the
mouth of that black alley. There he halts again. Look at him. He has
arrived in London but that very night, after an absence of more than
four years. He has arrived from the sea-side on foot; see, his shoes are
worn into holes. He has not yet found a shelter for the night. He has
been directed towards that quarter, thronged with adventurers, native
and foreign, for a shelter, safe, if squalid. It is somewhere near that
court at the mouth of which he stands. He looks round: the policeman
is baffled; the coast clear. He steals forth, and pauses under the same
gaslight as that under which Guy Darrell had paused before,--under the
same gaslight, under the same stars. From some recess in his rags he
draws forth a large, distai