"Well," said Ned Bayliss, "and if he is, and if he left all to his wife for as long as she kept his name, and if she married a second time and got her new husband to change his name instead of _her_ changing _hers_--how is that, do you think, Matt Jordan?" It was plain by Ned Bayliss's manner and by the way in which this speech was received by the listeners that he was looked up to as a being of extraordinary mental endowment, and possessed preëminently of the power of lucid exposition. "True enough," said Matt Jordan humbly, as he hitched up his trousers and shifted his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, and coughed a self-deprecatory cough. "And a snug property he has come into, I say. I only wish I was in his place." Jordan was a squat, ill-favoured man of forty. "Why," said Bayliss derisively, "a man with your points wouldn't throw himself away on a sickly widow with only a matter of a thousand a-year or thereabouts out of a lot of ramshackle tenement-houses and canal wharfs. You'd look higher, Matt. Why, you'd want a titled lady, any way. With your face and figure, you ought to be able to do a great deal better than an elderly sickly widow, even if she is rich." Jordan shifted his felt hat, made no reply, and for a while there was silence. Crawford's House, of which the loungers on Welford Bridge were speaking, stood a few feet back from the inner edge of Crawford's Bay, about three hundred yards from the bridge. Jim Ford, the first speaker, had concluded, from seeing all the sashes of the house open, and a woman cleaning a window, and a strip of carpet hanging out of another, that a tenant had been found for this lonely and isolated dwelling, which had been standing idle for years. "Have you seen this turncoat Crawford?" asked a man after a pause. No one had seen him. "He must have a spirit no better than a dog's to change his name for her money," said Red Jim, without abandoning his study of Crawford's House, on which his vacant eyes now rested with as much curiosity as the expressionless blue orbs were capable of. "It would be very handy for _some_ people to change their names like that, or in any other way that wouldn't bring a trifle of canvas and a few copper bolts to the mind of any one in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks," said Bayliss, looking at that point of the sky directly above him, lest any one might fancy his words had a personal application. With an oath, Red Jim turned round, and, keeping his side close to the parapet, slouched slowly away towards the King William public-house, which stood at the bottom of the short approach to the steep humpbacked bridge.