oy was almost as
timorously entranced as he had been in infancy by untimely tale of crime.
He stood gloating over the gruesome relics, over ropes which had hanged
men whose trials he had read for himself in later days, and yet wondering
with it all whether he would ever get these things out of his mind again.
They filled it to overflowing. He might have had the horrid place to
himself. Yet he had entered it with much amusement at the heels of a
whole family in deep mourning, a bereaved family drowning their sorrow in
a sea of gore, their pilot through the catalogue a conscientious orphan
with a monotonous voice and a genius for mis-pronunciation. Pocket had
soon ceased to see or hear him or any other being not made of wax. And it
was only when he was trying to place a nice-looking murderer in a straw
hat, who suddenly moved into a real sightseer like himself, that the
unwholesome spell was broken.

Pocket was not sorry to be back in the adulterated sunshine and the
comparatively fresh air of the Marylebone Road. He was ashamed to find
that it was after four o'clock. Guy and Vivian Knaggs would be home from
Westminster in another hour. Still it was no use getting there before
them, and he might as well walk as not; it was pleasant to rub shoulders
with flesh and blood once more, and to look in faces not made of wax in
the devil's image. His way, which he knew of old, would naturally have
led him past Miss Harbottle's door; but, as she was only to be his second
string for the night, he preferred not to be seen by that old lady yet.
Such was the tiny spring of an important action; it led the wanderer into
Circus Road and a quite unforeseen temptation.

In the Circus Road there happens to be a highly respectable pawnbroker's
shop; in the pawnbroker's window the chances are that you might still find
a motley collection of umbrellas, mandolines, family Bibles, ornaments and
clocks, strings of watches, trays of purses, opera-glasses, biscuit-boxes,
photograph frames and cheap jewellery, all of which could not tempt you
less than they did Pocket Upton the other June. There were only two
things in the window that interested him at all, and they were not both
temptations. One was an old rosewood camera, and Pocket was interested in
cameras old and new; but the thing that tempted him was a little revolver
at five-and-six, with what looked like a box of cartridges beside it,
apparently thrown in for the price. A revolver