y dear,' said John, 'to make a
short excursion with me in which you shall be a sharer. He will take
something to eat and drink, I dare say, on your invitation, while you
are getting your bonnet on.'

Mr Inspector declined eating, but assented to the proposal of a glass of
brandy and water. Mixing this cold, and pensively consuming it, he broke
at intervals into such soliloquies as that he never did know such a
move, that he never had been so gravelled, and that what a game was
this to try the sort of stuff a man's opinion of himself was made
of! Concurrently with these comments, he more than once burst out a
laughing, with the half-enjoying and half-piqued air of a man, who
had given up a good conundrum, after much guessing, and been told the
answer. Bella was so timid of him, that she noted these things in a
half-shrinking, half-perceptive way, and similarly noted that there was
a great change in his manner towards John. That coming-along-with-him
deportment was now lost in long musing looks at John and at herself and
sometimes in slow heavy rubs of his hand across his forehead, as if he
were ironing cut the creases which his deep pondering made there. He had
had some coughing and whistling satellites secretly gravitating towards
him about the premises, but they were now dismissed, and he eyed John as
if he had meant to do him a public service, but had unfortunately been
anticipated. Whether Bella might have noted anything more, if she
had been less afraid of him, she could not determine; but it was all
inexplicable to her, and not the faintest flash of the real state of the
case broke in upon her mind. Mr Inspector's increased notice of herself
and knowing way of raising his eyebrows when their eyes by any chance
met, as if he put the question 'Don't you see?' augmented her timidity,
and, consequently, her perplexity. For all these reasons, when he
and she and John, at towards nine o'clock of a winter evening went to
London, and began driving from London Bridge, among low-lying water-side
wharves and docks and strange places, Bella was in the state of a
dreamer; perfectly unable to account for her being there, perfectly
unable to forecast what would happen next, or whither she was going, or
why; certain of nothing in the immediate present, but that she confided
in John, and that John seemed somehow to be getting more triumphant. But
what a certainty was that!

They alighted at last at the corner of a court, where the