s possible to the
sides of the houses. It would have been easy to walk off the pavement
into the middle of the street but for the edges of the curb and the step
downward from its level. Traffic had almost absolutely ceased, though
in the more important streets link-boys were making efforts to guide
men or four-wheelers slowly along. The blind feeling of the thing was
rather awful. Though but few pedestrians were out, Dart found himself
once or twice brushing against or coming into forcible contact with men
feeling their way about like himself.

"One turn to the right," he repeated mentally, "two to the left, and the
place is at the corner of the other side of the street."

He managed to reach it at last, but it had been a slow, and therefore,
long journey. All the gas-jets the little shop owned were lighted, but
even under their flare the articles in the window--the one or two once
cheaply gaudy dresses and shawls and men's garments--hung in the haze
like the dreary, dangling ghosts of things recently executed. Among
watches and forlorn pieces of old-fashioned jewelry and odds and ends,
the pistol lay against the folds of a dirty gauze shawl. There it was.
It would have been annoying if someone else had been beforehand and had
bought it.

Inside the shop more dangling spectres hung and the place was almost
dark. It was a shabby pawnshop, and the man lounging behind the counter
was a shabby man with an unshaven, unamiable face.

"I want to look at that pistol in the right-hand corner of your window,"
Antony Dart said.

The pawnbroker uttered a sound something between a half-laugh and a
grunt. He took the weapon from the window.

Antony Dart examined it critically. He must make quite sure of it. He
made no further remark. He felt he had done with speech.

Being told the price asked for the purchase, he drew out his purse and
took the money from it. After making the payment he noted that he still
possessed a five-pound note and some sovereigns. There passed through
his mind a wonder as to who would spend it. The most decent thing,
perhaps, would be to give it away. If it was in his room--to-morrow--
the parish would not bury him, and it would be safer that the parish
should.

He was thinking of this as he left the shop and began to cross the
street. Because his mind was wandering he was less watchful. Suddenly
a rubber-tired hansom, moving without sound, appeared immediately in his
path--the horse's