p Conduit Street, up Regent Street, and across the
Circus. The frost had deepened and the mud in the roadway crackled
under our feet. At the Circus I began to guess, and when Gervase struck
off into Great Portland Street, and thence by half-a-dozen turnings
northward by east, I knew to what house he was leading me.

At the entrance of the side street in which it stood he halted and
motioned me to come close.

"I forget," he said with a jerk of his thumb, "if you still have the
entry. These people are not particular, to be sure."

"I have not," I answered, and felt my cheeks burning. He could not see
this, nor could I see the lift of his eyebrows as he answered--

"Ah? I hadn't heard of it. . . . You'd better step round by the mews,
then. You know the window, the one which opens into the passage leading
to Pollox Street. Wait there. It may be ten minutes before I can
open."

I nodded. The house was a corner one, between the street and a by-lane
tenanted mostly by cabmen; and at the back of it ran the mews where
they stabled their horses. Half-way down this mews a narrow alley cut
across it at right angles: a passage un-frequented by traffic, known
only to the stablemen, and in the daytime used only by their children,
who played hop-scotch on the flagged pavement, where no one interrupted
them. You wondered at its survival--from end to end it must have
measured a good fifty yards--in a district where every square foot of
ground fetched money; until you learned that the house had belonged, in
the 'twenties, to a nobleman who left a name for eccentric profligacy,
and who, as owner of the land, could afford to indulge his humours.
The estate since his death was in no position to afford money for
alterations, and the present tenants of the house found the passage
convenient enough.

My footsteps disturbed no one in the sleeping mews; and doubling back
noiselessly through the passage, I took up my station beside the one low
window which opened upon it from the blank back premises of the house.
Even with the glimmer of snow to help me, I had to grope for the
window-sill to make sure of my bearings. The minutes crawled by, and
the only sound came from a stall where one of the horses had kicked
through his thin straw bedding and was shuffling an uneasy hoof upon the
cobbles. Then just as I too had begun to shuffle my frozen feet, I
heard a scratching sound, the unbolting of a shutter, and Gervase drew
up the s