“I don’t think so. We never mentioned you. I believe he’s forgotten your existence altogether; he began by looking at me as though he’d forgotten mine. He says he wants nothing, except time to write. He seems so strange—so old!” Again the break in her voice, and again the boyish sympathy in his. “I wonder if something would be any comfort to you?” “I don’t think so. What is it?” “Something I saw in the paper he brought in with him. I lit the gas while you were upstairs.” Phillida turned it out again without comment. “Nothing that you saw can make any difference to me,” she sighed. “Do you remember my saying there must be another man in these—mysteries?” “I think I do. What difference does it make? Besides, the man you meant is in prison.” “He isn’t!” “You said he was?” “He was let out early this morning! Let me light the gas while you read it for yourself.” But Phillida had no desire to read it for herself. “I doubt if there’s anything in that,” she said; “but what if there were? Does it make it any better if a man has an accomplice in his crimes? If he’s guilty at all, it makes it all the worse.” CHAPTER XIX. THE FOURTH CASE The boy and girl sat long and late in the open window at the back of the house. The room would have been in darkness but for a flood of moonlight pouring over them. The only light in the house was in the room above, and they only saw its glimmer on the garden when a casual cloud hid the moon; but once Pocket had crept out into the garden to steal a look at the lighted window itself; and what he saw was the shadow of a huge bent head smoking a huge bent pipe, and dense clouds of shadow floating up the wall and over the ceiling. It seemed hours since they had heard footstep or other sound upstairs or anywhere. There had been a brisk interval—and then an end—of more or less distant hansom-bells and motor-horns. There was no longer even a certain minute intermittent trembling of trifles on the walnut-tables, to which Pocket had become subconsciously accustomed in that house, so that he noticed its absence more than the thing itself. It was as though the whole town was at rest, and the tunnels under the town, and every single soul above or below ground, but those two white faces in the moonlight, and perhaps one other overhead. Pocket wondered; it was so long since a single sound had come down to their ears. He wanted to steal out and look up again. Phillida was against it; perhaps she was wondering too. Pocket, as usual, saw what he did see so very vividly, in his mind’s eye, that he shivered and was asked if he felt cold. The whispered debate that followed was the longest conversation they had that night. The window was not shut as a result of it, but Pocket fetched his overcoat on tiptoe, and it just went over both their shoulders, when the chairs were drawn as near together as they would go.