“At six o’clock this evening, punctually. I undertake full responsibility for this course, you understand, Ingram? If anything, in any way, should miscarry, I am the one to blame.” His manner had grown suddenly very grave and earnest. He left the Superintendent curious, but impressed against his will. At six o’clock to the tick the detective arrived at the office, presenting the appearance of a stalwart, silent man, who knew how to keep his thoughts to himself. Gilead, after a few words of instruction, slipped an electric torch into his pocket (a precaution impressed upon him through his late experiences in the Empty House), locked up the place, and, descending to the hall, deposited the keys with the porter and issued with his companion into the street. It was a shrill inclement evening. Bitter north-easterly winds had succeeded to the fogs of the week past, and the mud in the roads was long crumbled into an arid dust, which was swept up in clouds and blown in stormy veils above the house-tops. The pavements were as white as picked bones; the very flames of the lamps shivered in their little glass-houses; one took the stinging blasts headforemost, grinding them in palpable grit between one’s teeth, and, detesting all things and people, butted aggressive into struggling pedestrians, and gloried in the proverbial coldness of charity. Gilead was constitutionally incapable of such spleen; yet even his invincible courtesy found a difficulty in keeping, so to speak, its equilibrium; and when, as it once happened, a little cold grimy hand, gripping a couple of match-boxes, was thrust across his path, he drove half-consciously upon the obstruction, and scattered it to the winds. The act, repented as soon as done, had been due more to a sense of urgency than of irritation; but it had the effect of checking his somewhat excited career, and of restoring to him his moral balance. The fortunate urchin, having profited by it to the tune of a gold piece, dropped voicelessly behind. The two men beating up Victoria Street, and across the cold comfort of Broad Sanctuary, headed for Westminster Bridge with set teeth. If they had attempted speech, the wind would have howled them down. It was a charging voice, a destructive terrorist, that shivered the lamps on the river into splinters of light, and hammered screeching on the doors and windows of the timid, and blew such an accumulation of human fuel into the public-house bars that they blazed and roared again. It was for this reason, no doubt, that Lower Marsh exhibited, when they turned into it, a darkly depopulated aspect. Its traffic seemed shrunk to a minimum, the bones of its squalid ugliness were laid bare, the small grime of humanity that drifted down its pavements appeared of less account than the dust whirled about its lamp-posts. It was in the shadowy neutral ground between two of these that Gilead halted his companion, and pointed to the name of J. Jenniver written above their heads.