So he was out of jail! Looking at the date of the postmark, Peter had discovered that for two nights the man who was lonely had waited. In the four and a half years since he had vanished from the living world his name had been scarcely mentioned. At Topbury the effort had been made to blot out disgrace by forgetting. Jehane, when she had left Sandport, had purposely dropped her old acquaintance and had passed among recent friends as a widow. The fiction had been so earnestly cultivated that it had seemed almost true that Ocky Waffles was dead--true even to Peter and Glory. Now, like the remembered tragedy about a death-bed, when the hands had been long since folded, flowers placed upon the breast and the coffin carried out, the dead man had come back to die afresh. To say that Peter resented his return would be an exaggeration. But he shrank from the intrusion of the sordid past upon the golden poetry of the present--shrank from it as he would shrink from meeting someone hideously marred in a gay spring woodland. The cab wheels caught in the tram-lines and jerked him into consciousness of his whereabouts. They had turned into the High Street. In three minutes they would be at Topbury Cock, and then----. Already in the distance he could see where the plane-trees in the Fields commenced. What should he do if his uncle were standing there? His father's house? No. He raised the trap in the roof. “When you come to the bottom of the Crescent walk your horse. Understand?” Shops were closing. Girls and men were pouring out on to the pavement, meeting with a quick flash of eyes and strolling away together. Some of them boarded trams, going up to Highgate to breathe the evening air. The sun was setting. The horse slowed down. At the corner a crowd was gathered about a band. People were singing. Peter caught the words: “If you won't come to Heaven Then you'll have to go to Hell; For the Devil he is waiting, But with Jesus all is well. Though your sins be as scarlet, He will wash them in His blood; So hurry up to Jesus And He'll make you good. Hallelujah!” Grace was standing in the middle of the circle banging on her drum, her mouth wide open in her big poke-bonnet. On the cab-stand, lolling on his box, pretending to be half asleep, sat Mr. Grace. His daughter's eyes were on him. Peter scanned the crowd. It was composed of idlers, onlookers and scoffers, with a sprinkling of converts. The converts were noticeable by their pale, indignant enthusiasm.