He picked up a stained newspaper, and tried to read; but before his eyes, again and again, came the image of the dead face, which had stared into his that night. So much had happened—so much that was wild and strange—within the past few hours, that it all seemed like some horrible unruly nightmare. Yet he knew that it was something more than that; for his fingers touched the papers in his pocket, and the watch that had belonged to the dead man. For a moment, as his hands closed upon them, a sweat of fear broke out upon his forehead, and he glanced about him uneasily. “It’s a desperate game,” he muttered. “If the body should be found, and recognised—or if the likeness be not so complete as I have thought—what shall I say—what shall I do? Why—I don’t even know what manner of man this Dandy Chater was—or what were his habits, his companions, the places to which he resorted; I know absolutely nothing. Every step of the way I must grope in the dark. And I may betray myself at any moment!” He dropped the paper from before his eyes, and found, to his astonishment, and somewhat to his discomfiture, that he was being steadily regarded, by a man who sat at the other side of the table. More than that, the man, having his back towards the little inner room where the meal was being prepared, nodded his head quickly, in a familiar fashion, and bent forward, and whispered the following astounding remark— “Wot—give the Count the slip—’ave yer?” Philip Crowdy’s position, at that moment, was not an enviable one. He was utterly alone, in the sense that, whatever battles lay before him, he had to fight them as best he could, and dared not trust any living soul; worse than all, he must fight them in the dark, not knowing, when he took one step, where the next might lead. Moreover, the man before him was one of the most repulsive looking ruffians it is possible to imagine—a man who, from his appearance, might have been one of those unfortunates described by the proprietor of the place as never sleeping in a bed. His clothes, which had once been black, were of a greenish hue, from long exposure to the weather, and were fastened together, in the more necessary places, by pins and scraps of string. His face, long and thin and cadaverous, had upon it, besides its native dirt, a week’s growth of beard and moustache; his hair—thin almost to baldness on the top—hung long about his ears, and was rolled inwards at the ends, in the fashion of some thirty years ago. Crowdy, after eyeing this man for a few moments in silence, grunted something inaudible, and took up the paper again. “No offence, Dandy,” said the man, somewhat more humbly, and in the same hoarse whisper as before. “Seed yer outside—an’ came in arter yer. Agin the rules—an’ well I knows it; but there ain’t no one ’ere to twig us—is there?” “Well—what of that?” asked the other, taking his cue from the fellow’s humility. “Can’t you let a man alone, even at this hour? What the devil do you want now?”