Bessy was infected with the excitement, and stumped downstairs to honour Johnny’s setting out. He left the shop-door half an hour too soon, with a boot flung after him. The darkness of the street seemed more solid at this hour than ever at midnight, and it almost smothered the faint gas-lights. Now and again a touch of sleet came down the wind, and a little dirty, half-melted snow of yesterday made the ways sloppy. Nobody was about, to view the manly glory of Johnny’s white ducks, and he was not sorry now that his overcoat largely hid them, for the wind was cold. And he reflected with satisfaction that the warming of his coffee on a furnace would smoke the inglorious newness off the tin can ere he carried it home in the open day. The one or two policemen he met regarded him curiously, for workmen were not yet moving. But the coffee-stall was open by the swing bridge, and here the wind came over the river with an added chill. The coffee-stall keeper had no customers, and on the bridge and in the straight street beyond it nobody was in sight. Till presently a small figure showed indistinctly ahead, and crossed the road as though to avoid him. It moved hurriedly, keeping timidly to the wall, and Johnny saw it was a girl of something near his own age. He tramped on, and the girl, once past, seemed to gather courage, turned, and made a few steps after him. At this he stopped, and she spoke from a few yards off. She was a decently-dressed and rather a pretty girl, as he could see by the bad light of the nearest lamp, but her face was drawn with alarm, and her eyes were wet. “Please have you seen a lady anywhere?” she asked tremulously. “Ill?” Johnny had seen no lady, ill or well, and when he said no, the young girl, with a weak “Thank-you,” hastened on her way. It was very odd, thought Johnny, as he stared into the dark where she vanished. Who should lose a lady—ill—in Blackwall streets at this time of a pitch dark morning? As he thought, there rose in his mind the picture of gran’dad, straying and bloody and sick to death, that night that seemed so far away, though it was but a month or two since. Maybe the lady had wandered from her bed in some such plight as that. Johnny was sorry for the girl’s trouble, and would have liked to turn aside and join in her search; but this was the hour of great business of his own, and he went his way about it. The policemen were knocking at doors now, rousing workmen, who answered with shouts from within. An old night-watchman, too, scurrying his hardest (for he had farther to go than the policemen), banged impatiently at the knockers of the more conservative and old-fashioned. And as Johnny neared Maidment and Hurst’s, the streets grew busy with the earliest workmen—those who lived farthest from their labour.