'Clever!' Mr Byrle repeated, with a deal of contempt in his voice--'clever! Who but her would have found out the scheme'---- 'Hush!' said the skipper, stopping the young man, just as his conversation was getting, I may say, instructive and important. Then Edmund Byrle said his train was due, and posted off to the station. A minute or so after I heard the skipper put down his glass as though he had emptied it, and then he too left. I followed at a little distance, and got into the same train with him, and got out with him, and still following, saw him go to the ferry, pick out, as I knew he would, the surly waterman; and I saw him rowed to his own ship, where the waterman left him and then rowed over to the other side. Very good. Then the skipper had gone to T---- specially to meet Edmund Byrle; and Edmund Byrle had gone there specially because his father was away; and---- Then I couldn't follow it up any further. I went boldly into the _Yarmouth Smack_, and not seeing Tilley anywhere about, I asked for him under the agreed name, and was told he had gone to work on Byrle's wharf; not for the firm, but for some lighterman who frequented the public-house. This looked well; and if I got taken on, as I expected, the next Monday, I thought it would be very odd if between us we didn't find something out. Yet my interest in the business seemed dying away, or drifting into altogether a new channel, for I could not believe for a moment that Miss Doyle and Edmund Byrle, and the skipper and the sulky ferryman, were all linked in with stealing a few paltry brass fittings. I crossed over before the old ferryman came back, and had my dinner in the tap-room of the _Anchor and Five Mermaids_. It wasn't a nice place for a dinner, and I was always partial to having my things neat and tidy, which was by no means the rule at the _Anchor_, and the company was not to my standard. I was late to-day, so I missed the factory hands; and there were only two men in the room with me; one was a costermongerish-looking rough in a velveteen coat and fur cap, which was about all I could see of him, for he was asleep all of a heap in a corner. The other was a man who had his dinner in a newspaper, and took it out, whatever it was, with his fingers, till he had finished it and then went away.