Gray’s hand mechanically moved towards his breast for his pistol, but before he could reach it the brawny hand of the man was upon his throat, and holding Gray as if he had been an infant in his herculean grasp, he himself took the pistol from him and put it in his own pocket, saying,— “Thank you, I’ll mind it for you.” “Let me go,” gasped Gray. “Then you don’t doubt my honour?” “No, no—certainly not.” “Oh, very well, I thought you didn’t mean it.” Gray was then liberated from the grasp which came within one degree of suffocation, and he said,— “I will be candid with you. I have forty pounds with me, which I will divide as you propose.” “Forty? Humph! It’s d—d little; but I hate all grumbling. We can’t have more than a cat and her skin, say I.” “No, certainly,” said Gray. “I didn’t understand you at first you see, or I should never have for a moment hesitated.” “Oh, it’s all right—it’s all right. Never say die, sink me.” “That’ll be ten pounds each,” remarked Gray, who really, as we know, had a very large sum about him—a sum so large indeed as materially to have inconvenienced him in his race down the Strand. “So it will,” replied the man. “Now, you know the rules, my covey, as well as I do, I dare say?” “What rules?” “Why, you must strip and let me examine, for myself and Bill and Bill’s young woman, all your togs, to see whether you haven’t forgot a stray five pound note or so. No offence, my covey; but you know rules is rules all the world over, and fair play is a jewel of very great lustre, my rum ’un.” CHAPTER LV. The Escape over the Houses.—Many Perils.—Gray’s Great Sufferings.—The Guide Rope. Gray was silent for some moments, then, with, a deep groan, he dropped his head upon his hands, and gave himself up to a bitterness of anguish that must have both alarmed and melted any heart but the stubborn one of the man who now had him in his power. “All I have struggled for,” thought Gray—“all that I have dipped my hands in blood for is about to be wrested from me for the mere doubtful boon of existence.” At that awful moment of misery he did indeed feel that he had chosen the wrong path in life, and the gaudy flowers which had lured him from the right road of virtue to the intricate one of crime and deep iniquity, were but delusion, and had vanished, now leaving him a wanderer in a region of dissolution and gaunt despair. Oh, what would he have not given in that awful moment, when busy memory conjured up all his crimes before him in frightful array, to have been the veriest beggar that ever crept for alms from door to door, so that he could have said, “I am innocent of great wrong—I have shed no man’s blood!”