I listened; there was no sound but the soughing of the roadside trees in the evening wind. I endeavored to reassure him, with such success that in a few moments the old weak smile appeared on his benevolent face. “Why?”—But the look of interrogation was succeeded by a hopeless blankness. “Why?” I repeated with assuring accents. “Why,” he said, a gleam of intelligence flickering over his face, “is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean, casting a flood of light o’er hill and dale, like—Why,” he repeated, with a feeble smile, “is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean”—He hesitated,—stammered,—and gazed at me hopelessly, with the tears dripping from his moist and widely opened eyes. I took his hand kindly in my own. “Casting a shadow o’er hill and dale,” I repeated quietly, leading him up to the subject, “like—Come, now.” “Ah!” he said, pressing my hand tremulously, “you know it?” “I do. Why is it like—the—eh—the commodious mansion on the Limehouse Road?” A blank stare only followed. He shook his head sadly. “Like the young men wanted for a light, genteel employment?” He wagged his feeble old head cunningly. “Or, Mr. Ward,” I said, with bold confidence, “like the mysterious disappearance from the Kent Road?” The moment was full of suspense. He did not seem to hear me. Suddenly he turned. “Ha!” I darted forward. But he had vanished in the darkness. CHAPTER III NO. 27 LIMEHOUSE ROAD It was a hot midsummer evening. Limehouse Road was deserted save by dust and a few rattling butchers’ carts, and the bell of the muffin and crumpet man. A commodious mansion, which stood on the right of the road as you enter Pultneyville, surrounded by stately poplars and a high fence surmounted by a cheval de frise of broken glass, looked to the passing and footsore pedestrian like the genius of seclusion and solitude. A bill announcing in the usual terms that the house was to let hung from the bell at the servants’ entrance. As the shades of evening closed, and the long shadows of the poplars stretched across the road, a man carrying a small kettle stopped and gazed, first at the bill and then at the house. When he had reached the corner of the fence, he again stopped and looked cautiously up and down the road. Apparently satisfied with the result of his scrutiny, he deliberately sat himself down in the dark shadow of the fence, and at once busied himself in some employment, so well concealed as to be invisible to the gaze of passers-by. At the end of an hour he retired cautiously. But not altogether unseen. A slim young man, with spectacles and notebook, stepped from behind a tree as the retreating figure of the intruder was lost in the twilight, and transferred from the fence to his notebook the freshly stenciled inscription, “S—T—1860—X.” CHAPTER IV COUNT MOSCOW’S NARRATIVE