might have hurried over his toilet; but Archie, faced by
a difficult choice of ties, rather strung the thing out. He selected a
specimen which did great credit to the taste of Mr. Moon, evidently
one of our snappiest dressers, found that it did not harmonise with the
deeper meaning of the tweed suit, removed it, chose another, and was
adjusting the bow and admiring the effect, when his attention was
diverted by a slight sound which was half a cough and half a sniff; and,
turning, found himself gazing into the clear blue eyes of a large man
in uniform, who had stepped into the room from the fire-escape. He was
swinging a substantial club in a negligent sort of way, and he looked at
Archie with a total absence of bonhomie.

"Ah!" he observed.

"Oh, THERE you are!" said Archie, subsiding weakly against the chest
of drawers. He gulped. "Of course, I can see you're thinking all this
pretty tolerably weird and all that," he proceeded, in a propitiatory
voice.

The policeman attempted no analysis of his emotions, He opened a mouth
which a moment before had looked incapable of being opened except with
the assistance of powerful machinery, and shouted a single word.

"Cassidy!"

A distant voice gave tongue in answer. It was like alligators roaring to
their mates across lonely swamps.

There was a rumble of footsteps in the region of the stairs, and
presently there entered an even larger guardian of the Law than the
first exhibit. He, too, swung a massive club, and, like his colleague,
he gazed frostily at Archie.

"God save Ireland!" he remarked.

The words appeared to be more in the nature of an expletive than a
practical comment on the situation. Having uttered them, he draped
himself in the doorway like a colossus, and chewed gum.

"Where ja get him?" he enquired, after a pause.

"Found him in here attimpting to disguise himself."

"I told Cap. he was hiding somewheres, but he would have it that he'd
beat it down th' escape," said the gum-chewer, with the sombre triumph
of the underling whose sound advice has been overruled by those above
him. He shifted his wholesome (or, as some say, unwholesome) morsel to
the other side of his mouth, and for the first time addressed Archie
directly. "Ye're pinched!" he observed.

Archie started violently. The bleak directness of the speech roused him
with a jerk from the dream-like state into which he had fallen. He had
not anticipated this. He had assumed that there would b