But far worse had been his watchings and prowlings round and about the house in Grosvenor Place. Could he have blundered upon anything more full of certain peril? Why, to stand still for ten minutes in London is to invite the attention of the police. Their very motto or watchword is "Move on;" and for every policeman in helmet and buttons there are three policemen in plain clothes to make sure that people _are_ moving on. While watching that house he had been watched himself. Then, again, the insane episode of the eating-house--the wild hastening of his program, the untimely change of appearance in that thronged room--and his rudeness to the woman behind the counter. With anguish he remembered, or fancied he remembered, that she had looked at him resentfully seeming to say as she studied his face. "I'm sizing you up. Yes, I won't forget you--you brute." His bag too--left by him at Waterloo for a solid proof that he was _not_ in London as he pretended. The bag was at the cloak-room all right when he came to fetch it, but perhaps in the meantime it had been to Scotland Yard and back again. Besides, Waterloo was a station he should never once have showed his nose in; the link between Waterloo and home was too close--his own line--the railway whose staff was replenished by people from his own part of the country. While he was feeling glad that the passengers were strangers, perhaps a porter was saying to a mate: "There goes the postmaster of Rodchurch. He and I were boys together. I should know him anywhere, though it's ten years since I last saw William Dale." He ought to have used Paddington Station--he could have got to Salisbury that way, and gone into the woods the way he came out of them. Last of all, that child in the glade--a child strayed from one of the cottages, or the child of some woodcutter who had brought her with him, who was perhaps a very little way off, who listened to the tale of what the child had seen five minutes after she had seen it. Of course nothing much would be thought of the child's tale at first; but it would assume importance directly suspicion had been aroused; it would link up with other circumstances, it would suggest new ideas and further researches to the minds of detectives, it might be the clue that eventually hanged him. It seemed to Dale as he went over things in this quivering, quaking manner that, from the little girl weaving flowers back to the two Jews selling slops, he had recruited an army of witnesses to denounce and destroy him. Only in one respect had he not bungled. He got rid of the clothes and hat all right. Cut and torn into narrow stripes they had gone comfortably down the drains of the temperance hotel in Stamford Street. That was a night's wise labor. But the labor and thoughtful care had come too late, on top of all the previous folly.