In the kitchen at Lille there had been a picture called "The Impenitent Sinner," in which demons were seen dragging a dead man from his bed into flames and darkness; Sylvia pointed out its likeness to the present scene at Charing Cross. Outside the station it was even worse. There was a thunderous din; horses came suddenly out of the darkness; everybody seemed to be shouting; boys were running along with torches; it was impossible to breathe. "Why did they build a city here?" she inquired. At last they came to a house in a quieter street, where they walked up high, narrow stairs to their bedrooms. The next morning her father took Sylvia's measurements and told her not to get up before he came back. When she walked out beside him in a Norfolk suit nobody seemed to stare at her; when her hair had been properly cut by a barber and she could look at herself in a long glass, she plunged her hands into her trousers pockets and felt securely a boy. While they were walking to a mysterious place called the Underground, her father asked if she had caught bronchitis, and he would scarcely accept her word that she was trying to practise whistling. "Well, don't do it when I'm inquiring about rooms or the people in the house may think it's something infectious," he advised. "And don't forget your name's Sylvester. Which reminds me it wouldn't be a bad notion if I was to change my own name. There's no sense in running one's head into a noose, and if inquiries _were_ made by the police it would be foolish to ram my name right down their throats. Henry Snow. What about Henry White? Better keep to the same initials. I've got it. Henry Scarlett. You couldn't find anything more opposite to Snow than that." Thus Sylvia Snow became Sylvester Scarlett. After a long search they took rooms with Mrs. Threadgould, a widow who with her two boys, Willie and Ernie, lived at 45 Pomona Terrace, Shepherd's Bush. There were no other lodgers, for the house was small; and Henry Scarlett decided it was just the place in which to stay quietly for a while until the small sum of money he had brought with him from Lille was finished, when it would be necessary to look for work. Meanwhile he announced that he should study very carefully the advertisements in the daily papers, leaving everybody with the impression that reading advertisements was a most erudite business, a kind of scientific training that when the moment arrived would produce practical results.