and never for a moment did the purpose in her face relax. She was thinking, she was not dreaming. After a while she looked at her watch, and rose. At the first step which she made on the grass, and towards the railings, her silk dress rustled over the outspread paper from which the boy was reading. She looked down, apologetically; the boy looked up angrily, and then Mr. James Swain jumped up, and made the movement which in his code of manners passed for a bow to Harriet. "Ah, is it you, Jim?" she said. "Are you not busy to-day?" "No, mum, I ain't," said Jim. "Mr. Routh hadn't no messages this mornin', and I ain't been lucky since." "It's a nice day for you to have a little time to yourself," said Harriet. "I hope you got all the commissions I left for you." "I did, mum, and thank'ee," said Jim. Harriet had remembered the street-boy when she was leaving home, and had charged her servants to employ him. She had not the slightest suspicion of the extensive use which Routh was in the habit of making of his services. "The windows is to be cleaned," said Jim, suggestively. "There warn't time, mum; you come home so unexpected." "Very well," said Harriet. "I suppose you can clean them, can't you?" "Mr. Harris said as I might try," returned Jim. Mr. Harris was the irreproachable man-servant attached to Routh's modest establishment in Mayfair. Harriet moved on, and Jim Swain stood still, looking after her. She was a puzzle to him, and an object of constant interest. By little and little Jim had come to know a good deal about Stewart Routh and his daily life, and he had abandoned the first theory which had presented itself to his mind, and which had owed its inspiration to the illustrated penny literature which formed his intellectual food. He no longer believed Harriet a persecuted victim of her husband's groundless jealousy. For reasons of his own, equally strong and secret, Mr. James Swain had taken a lively interest in George Dallas, had experienced certain emotions on seeing him, and had taken very kindly to the business of espionage in which Routh had engaged his services, without affording him any indication of its purpose. At first the boy had conceived an idea that Dallas was the object of Harriet's supposed preference and Routh's supposed jealousy, but he abandoned that notion very speedily, and since then he had not succeeded in forming any new theory to his satisfaction. From the conversation of the servants, Jim had learned that Mr. Dallas and Mr. Felton, with whose personal appearance the boy was equally familiar, had gone to the same place in foreign parts as that to which Mr. and Mrs. Routh had gone a little later, and knowing this, Jim thought more and more frequently over certain circumstances which he had kept to himself with extraordinary discretion--discretion, indeed, which nothing but the strongest possible sense of self-interest, as inseparable from its observance, could have enabled him to preserve.