eive him.

"But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may
doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of
the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but
such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many
improbable. Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be
drunk. Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!

"I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly and
quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently thought that
I was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly
and easily enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four
turnings, he trailed me with him, a limp and slow and reluctant figure.
At the fourth turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the
street like a maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was
dark. I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I was
gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and
blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried
them in clean earth."

The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair.
Both the matter and the manner of his narration had, as time went on,
impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind
these things he was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed
courage and a sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told
his story with many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very
convincing realism.

"And now--" I began.

"And now," said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like
servile energy, "and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy man
Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they said
was real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for
reasons that you perceive. Among other things, they wouldn't believe me.
What is to be done?"

I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.

"My friend Basil Grant," I said, "is the best man we can go to. He and I
were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will just have come
back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?"

"Not at all," he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd
plaid shawl.

A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen's
flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a wearis