So we treated him well and put him up for the night; and the following morning I drove him by way of Weybridge to Woking Road Station, or as near thereto as we could get without any one observing us. Then I went back to Weybridge, so as to meet him at that station, and hear all he had to say, before he took another train for London. Nothing could have been better managed. I borrowed a badge from Sims the flyman, and a spotted yellow neckerchief, and a broken whip, and Tony lounged into the inn-yard, as if he had left his cab down at the blacksmith’s by the bridge. As I saw him in the distance I said to myself that nature must have meant him for the driver of a cab, for he put his knee out and turned his heels in, and carried his elbows, as if he had been born so. Any brotherhood of good will and lofty feeling, such as that of cabmen essentially is, must welcome him at once, and make him free of any knowledge it possessed that would bring in nothing. And so it proved, when he rejoined me by the two o’clock train at Weybridge. “What have you ordered?” he asked; and I replied,— “Chump chops, new potatoes, and pickled onions.” “Couldn’t be better,” he was good enough to say; “but have in the pewter first. Blest if I believe there’s anything to parch the throat like a jolly good lie, and if I’ve told one, I’ve told fifty. Dinner first, business afterwards.” That I should consent to this will show how thoroughly I had been drilled by long endurance and fretful discipline. Perpetual disappointment too, and the habit which hope had now acquired of falling without a blow—just like an over-matched prize-fighter—as well as a sense of evil fortune, drove me sometimes almost into the apathy of a fatalist. And so I let Tony Tonks munch on, and even joined him in that process. “I wish I had got that to do again,” he said, as at last he laid down knife and fork; “I don’t often do so well as that. The air of these commons is uncommon sharp, sharper even than the Heath is. But you have been very patient, and I won’t keep you any longer. I found out all they knew back there, and it only cost a shilling. I don’t know that it is worth much more; for it carries us very little further. But so far as it goes, it is plain enough. I had it from Joe Clipson, the man who drove them; and no secret was made of the affair to him.” Now the story, as he had it, comes to this. Some one got out at Woking Road Station, on the afternoon of May 15th, it might have been an up or it might have been a down train, Clipson could not say, for two trains came in together, and the man had no luggage of any sort. The date could be fixed by several things, and there could not be any doubt about it. And the time when two trains meet there in the afternoon is 4.15; which comes pretty close to our figures.