The seriousness of the previous night had grown and deepened over the boy. Abandoning the pursuit of odd jobs precisely at the hour of the day when he usually found them most plentiful, Jim took his way homewards with headlong speed. Arrived within sight of the wretched houses, he paused. He did not wish any one to see what he was going to do. Fortune favoured him. As he stood irresolute at one end of the narrow street, his aunt came out of the door. She was going, he knew, to do her humble shopping, which consisted, for the most part, in haggling with costermongers by the side of their carts, and cheapening poor vegetables at the stalls. She would not be coming back just yet. He waited until she had turned the opposite corner, and then plunged into the open doorway and up the dark staircase. Arrived at the room which formed his sole habitation, Jim shut the door, and unceremoniously pulled away his flock bed, rolled up neatly enough in a corner, from the wall. This wall was covered with a paper once gaudy, now dreary with the utter dreariness of dirt charged on bright colour, and had a wooden surbase about a foot in depth. Above the surbase there was a hole, not so large as to be easily remarked in a place where dilapidation of every sort was the usual state of things, and in this hole Jim insinuated his hand. There was suggestive dexterity in the way he did this; the lithe fingers had suppleness and readiness, swiftness and accuracy of touch, which, if there had been any one to care for the boy, that one would doubtless have noticed with regret. If he were not already a thief, Jim Swain possessed some of the physical requisites for that profession. Presently he withdrew the lithe hand, and looked steadfastly at the object which it had extracted from the hole in the wall. He turned it over and over, he examined it within and without, then he put it back again in the hiding-place, and replaced his bed. Old Sally was much surprised, when she returned from her "marketing," to find her nephew at home. The apparition of Jim in the daytime, except on stray occasions, when, fortune being unpropitious, he would come home to see what his aunt could do for him in the way of dinner, was exceedingly rare. But he explained it now by saying he was tired, and had been well paid for a job he had done that morning. He proposed that he should get something choice that day for dinner, and stay "in" until evening. "There's a new play at the 'Delphi to-night," said Jim, "and there'll be plenty of jobs down that way, callin' cabs and helpin' visitors to the hupper circles, as can't afford 'em, across the street. They're awful bewildered, mostly, when they come out of the theayter, and dreadful timid of the 'busses."