on 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 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 chevaux 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
note-book, stepped from behind a tree as the retreating