He tried to lose it, and we began a chase, slow at first, and then faster and faster, down one street and up the other. The fog by this time was as thick and white as wool, and we seemed to break through it like a ship, as if we were going through something dense and hard to penetrate. It seemed to me, too, a maddeningly quiet night. There was no traffic, no noise of wheels to get mixed with ours. The _ker-lump!--ker-lump!_ of our horse’s hoofs came back as clear as sounds in a calm at sea from the long lines of house fronts. And that devilish hansom never lost us. It kept just the same distance behind us. We could hear its horse’s hoofs, like an echo of our own, beating through the fog. It got no nearer; it went no faster. It did not seem in a hurry, it never deviated from our track. There was something hideously unagitated and cool about it--a sort of deadly, sinister persistence. I saw it in imagination, like a live monster with bulging yellow eyes, staring with gloating greediness at us as we ran feebly along before it. Tom didn’t say much. He doesn’t in moments like this. He’s got the nerve all right, but not the brain. There’s no inventive ability in Tom, he’s not built for crises. Handsome Harry now and then dropped some remark through the trap, which was like a trickle of icy water down one’s spine. I began to realize that my lips were dry, and that the insides of my gloves were damp. I knew that whatever was to be done had to come from me. I’d got them into this, and, as they say in Chicago, “it was up to me” to get them out. I leaned over the doors, and looked at the street we were going through. I know that part of London like a book--the insides of some of the houses as well as the outsides; it’s a part of our business in which I’m supposed to be quite an expert. The street was a small one near Walworth Crescent, the houses not the smartest in the locality, but good, solid, reliable buildings inhabited by good, solid, reliable people. The lower floors were all alight. It was the heart of the season, and in many of them there were dinners afoot. I thought, with a flash of longing--such as a drowning man might feel if he thought of suddenly finding himself on terra firma--of serene, smiling people sitting down to soup. I’d have given the Castlecourt diamonds at that moment to have been sitting down with them to cold soup, sour soup, greasy soup, any kind of soup--only to be sitting down to soup!