ed, and she would not recognize him;
but he would recognize her, and his sufferings would be dreadful.

In the second place, to have to do his creeping about and spying
practically in her presence--

Still, business was business.

At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a
false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye.
If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business
man. As a matter of fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming
through a haystack.

The platform was crowded. Friends of the company had come to see the
company off. Henry looked on discreetly from behind a stout porter,
whose bulk formed a capital screen. In spite of himself, he was
impressed. The stage at close quarters always thrilled him. He
recognized celebrities. The fat man in the brown suit was Walter
Jelliffe, the comedian and star of the company. He stared keenly at him
through the spectacles. Others of the famous were scattered about. He
saw Alice. She was talking to a man with a face like a hatchet, and
smiling, too, as if she enjoyed it. Behind the matted foliage which he
had inflicted on his face, Henry's teeth came together with a snap.

In the weeks that followed, as he dogged 'The Girl From Brighton'
company from town to town, it would be difficult to say whether Henry
was happy or unhappy. On the one hand, to realize that Alice was so
near and yet so inaccessible was a constant source of misery; yet, on
the other, he could not but admit that he was having the very dickens
of a time, loafing round the country like this.

He was made for this sort of life, he considered. Fate had placed him
in a London office, but what he really enjoyed was this unfettered
travel. Some gipsy strain in him rendered even the obvious discomforts
of theatrical touring agreeable. He liked catching trains; he liked
invading strange hotels; above all, he revelled in the artistic
pleasure of watching unsuspecting fellow-men as if they were so many
ants.

That was really the best part of the whole thing. It was all very well
for Alice to talk about creeping and spying, but, if you considered it
without bias, there was nothing degrading about it at all. It was an
art. It took brains and a genius for disguise to make a man a
successful creeper and spyer. You couldn't simply say to yourself, 'I
will creep.' If you attempted to do it in your own person, you would be
detected instantl