about as if pounds were empty peascods. No! Mr. Gilverthwaite was giving
me that money because he thought that I, as a lawyer's clerk, would see
the thing in its right light as a secret and an important business, and
hold my tongue about it. And see it as a secret business I did--for what
else could it be that would make two men meet near an old ruin at
midnight, when in a town where, at any rate, one of them was a stranger,
and the other probably just as much so, they could have met by broad day
at a more convenient trysting-place without anybody having the least
concern in their doings? There was strange and subtle mystery in all
this, and the thinking and pondering it over led me before long to
wondering about its first natural consequence--who and what was the man I
was now on my way to meet, and where on earth could he be coming from to
keep a tryst at a place like that, and at that hour?

However, before I had covered three parts of that outward journey, I was
to meet another man who, all unknown to me, was to come into this truly
extraordinary series of events in which I, with no will of my own, was
just beginning--all unawares--to be mixed up. Taking it roughly, and as
the crow flies, it is a distance of some nine or ten miles from Berwick
town to Twizel Bridge on the Till, whereat I was to turn off from the
main road and take another, a by-lane, that would lead me down by the old
ruin, close by which Till and Tweed meet. Hot as the night was, and
unpleasant for riding, I had plenty and to spare of time in hand, and
when I came to the cross-ways between Norham and Grindon, I got off my
machine and sat down on the bank at the roadside to rest a bit before
going further. It was a quiet and a very lonely spot that; for three
miles or more I had not met a soul along the road, and there being next
to nothing in the way of village or farmstead between me and Cornhill, I
did not expect to meet one in the next stages of my journey. But as I sat
there on the bank, under a thick hedge, my bicycle lying at my side, I
heard steps coming along the road in the gloom--swift, sure steps, as of
a man who walks fast, and puts his feet firmly down as with determination
to get somewhere as soon as he may. And hearing that--and to this day I
have often wondered what made me do it--I off with my cap, and laid it
over the bicycle-lamp, and myself sat as still as any of the wee
creatures that were doubtless lying behind me in the hedge.