exclamation, drew his hat down well over his face, and pulled his coat collar higher.

There was no time even to get a ticket; Crowdy raced across the booking-office, and reached the platform just in time; wrenched open a door, and jumped in. He heard a shout, and, looking out, saw a porter pulling open another door, while the man who had been so particular about his boots sprang into the train. Then, the door was slammed, and the train, already in motion, steamed out of the station.

Philip Crowdy leant back in the compartment in which he found himself alone, and whistled softly. “This is a new move,” he muttered, “Dandy Chater himself—and without the girl. Well, most respectable Great Eastern Railway Company,” he added, with a laugh, apostrophising the name of the Company staring at him from the wall of the carriage—“it isn’t often that you carry, in one train, two such queer people as you carry to-night!” Then, becoming serious again, he said softly—“But I’d like to know what’s become of the girl.”

When the train reached Liverpool Street, Philip Crowdy remained in the carriage as long as possible, in order to avoid meeting the other man; and, on getting out, discovered to his annoyance that the other man had vanished—swallowed up in the restless crowds of people who were moving about the platforms. However, having one faint clue to guide him, he set off for Woolwich.

The Three Watermen is a little old-fashioned gloomy public-house, situated at the end of a narrow street, which plunges down towards the river, and on the very bank of that river itself. Indeed, it is half supported, on the riverside, by huge baulks of timber, round which the muddy water creeps and washes; and it is the presiding genius, as it were, over a number of tumble-down sheds and out-houses, used for the storage of river lumber of one sort or another, or, in some cases, not used at all. And it is the resort of various riverside men; with occasionally some stranger, who appears to belong to salter waters, and to have lost his way there, in getting to the sea.

Outside this place, Philip Crowdy waited, for a long time, in the shadow of a doorway, debating with himself what to do. Being practically in strange quarters, he had had to enquire every step of the way, both as to his journey by train to Woolwich, and afterwards, when he had reached the place. In consequence, he had lost a very considerable amount of time; and was well aware that, if the man he pursued had come to the place at all, he had had all the advantage, from the fact of knowing the way clearly, and being able to make straight for his destination. Under these circumstances, it was quite impossible for Crowdy to know whether the man was in the place, or, if so, how long he had been there—or even if he had not already left the house.

Turning over all these points in his mind, Crowdy wandered, half aimlessly, down a little alley, which led beside the Three Watermen towards the river. He had just reached the end of it, and was shivering a little, at the melancholy prospect of dark water and darker mud before him, when a man, rushing hurriedly from the direction of the water, almost carried him off his legs; snapped out an oath at him; and was gone up the alley, and into the street, before Crowdy had recovered his breath.

“People seem in a hurry about these parts,” he murmured to himself. “Now, I wonder what on earth that fellow was running away from?”

Impelled, half by curiosity, and half by the restlessness which possessed him, he turned and walked some little distance, over a kind of dilapidated wharf, in the direction from which the man had come. The place was quite lonely and deserted, and only the skeleton-like frames of