Tim Kelly bored his way into the eye of a rousing south wind that "reesled" among the bare bones of Samson's Ribs, and hurled itself upon Edinburgh as if to drive the city off its long, irregular ridge into the North Sea. Bending sharply to the right, the burglar came among buildings again. He crossed the marshy end of Duddingstone Loch. It was tinder-dry with the drought. At the end of a long avenue was to be seen the loom of houses, and the gleam of lights, as burgess's wife and burgess moved in this order to their bedrooms and disarrayed themselves for the night. Tim Kelly hid behind a wall. Cleg crouched behind his father, but sufficiently far behind not to attract his attention. Cleg was taking his first lessons in the great craft of speculation—which is the obtaining of your neighbour's goods without providing him with an equivalent in exchange. The trifling matter of your neighbour's connivance, requisite in betting and stock transactions, escaped the notice of the Kellys. But perhaps after all that did not matter. Aurelia Villa, the home of Miss Cecilia Tennant (incidentally also of her father, Mr. Robert Grey Tennant), darkened down early; for Mr. Robert Tennant was an early riser, and early rising means early bedding (and a very good thing too). Tim Kelly knew all that, for his local knowledge was as astonishing as his methods of obtaining it were mysterious. It was not twelve of the clock when Tim drew himself over the wall out of the avenue, and dropped lightly as a cat upon the pocket-handkerchief lawn, which all the summer had been worn at the corners by the egg-spoon tennis of Cecilia and the Junior Partner. Tim Kelly was at the back door in a minute. It was down three steps. He laid a bag of tools, which clinked a little as he took them out of his pocket, on the stone ledge of the step. It might be safer, he thought, to take a look round the house and listen for the hippopotamus tread of the regulation bull-hide. In a moment after Tim was round at the gable end flat among the strawberries. There it came! Clear and solemnising fell the tread of the law in all its majesty—a bull's-eye lantern swinging midships a sturdy girth, which could hardly, even by courtesy, be called a waist. Flash! Like a search-light ran the ray of the lantern over the front of the property of Mr. Robert Grey Tennant.