With that he sank upon the bottom of a grand flight of stone steps, dragging Blade-o'-Grass down beside him. There they remained, silent, for a few moments, and perhaps one in a hundred of the eager bustling throng turned to give the strange pair a second glance; but before sympathy had time to assume practical expression, a policeman came up to them, and bade them move on. Tom rose to his feet, wearily and painfully, and slowly moved away: a snail in its last minutes of life could scarcely have moved more slowly, if it had moved at all. He took good care to keep tight hold of the hand of Blade-o'-Grass, lest she should be pushed from him and be lost in the crowd. A notable contrast were these two outcasts--she, notwithstanding her fright and the pangs of hunger by which she was tormented, strong-limbed and sturdy for her age; and he drooping, tottering, with a death-look upon his face, as if every moment would be his last. You would have supposed that his mind was a blank to all but despair, and that he was praying for death; but the cunning and hypocrisy of Tom Beadle were not to be measured by an ordinary standard. He was as wide awake as a weasel, and although his eyes were to the ground, he saw everything that surged around him, and was as ready to take advantage of an opportunity as the sharpest rascal in London. As he and his companion made their way through the busy throng, they attracted the attention of two men--both of them elderly men, of some sixty years of age; one, well-dressed, with a bright eye and a benevolent face; the other, poorly but not shabbily dressed, and with a face out of which every drop of the milk of human kindness seemed to have been squeezed when he was a young man. When he looked at you, it appeared as if you were undergoing the scrutiny of two men; for one of his eyes had a dreadfully fixed and glassy stare in it, and the other might have been on fire, it was so fiercely watchful.