, when they were standing
under the bank, roared and riven at by the wind. 'There's the light of
her fire.'

'I'll take a peep through the window,' said Mortimer.

'No, don't!' Eugene caught him by the arm. 'Best, not make a show of
her. Come to our honest friend.'

He led him to the post of watch, and they both dropped down and crept
under the lee of the boat; a better shelter than it had seemed before,
being directly contrasted with the blowing wind and the bare night.

'Mr Inspector at home?' whispered Eugene.

'Here I am, sir.'

'And our friend of the perspiring brow is at the far corner there? Good.
Anything happened?'

'His daughter has been out, thinking she heard him calling, unless it
was a sign to him to keep out of the way. It might have been.'

'It might have been Rule Britannia,' muttered Eugene, 'but it wasn't.
Mortimer!'

'Here!' (On the other side of Mr Inspector.)

'Two burglaries now, and a forgery!'

With this indication of his depressed state of mind, Eugene fell silent.

They were all silent for a long while. As it got to be flood-tide, and
the water came nearer to them, noises on the river became more frequent,
and they listened more. To the turning of steam-paddles, to the clinking
of iron chain, to the creaking of blocks, to the measured working
of oars, to the occasional violent barking of some passing dog on
shipboard, who seemed to scent them lying in their hiding-place. The
night was not so dark but that, besides the lights at bows and mastheads
gliding to and fro, they could discern some shadowy bulk attached; and
now and then a ghostly lighter with a large dark sail, like a warning
arm, would start up very near them, pass on, and vanish. At this time
of their watch, the water close to them would be often agitated by some
impulsion given it from a distance. Often they believed this beat and
plash to be the boat they lay in wait for, running in ashore; and again
and again they would have started up, but for the immobility with which
the informer, well used to the river, kept quiet in his place.

The wind carried away the striking of the great multitude of city
church clocks, for those lay to leeward of them; but there were bells to
windward that told them of its being One--Two--Three. Without that aid
they would have known how the night wore, by the falling of the tide,
recorded in the appearance of an ever-widening black wet strip of shore,
and the emergence of the paved caus