time when all decent folk should be in their beds.  And for this first part of my journey my thoughts ran on that money, and on what Maisie and I would do with it when it was safely in my pocket.  We had already bought the beginnings of our furnishing, and had them stored in an unused warehouse at the back of her father’s premises; with Mr. Gilverthwaite’s bank-note, lying there snugly in waiting for me, we should be able to make considerable additions to our stock, and the wedding-day would come nearer.

But from these anticipations I presently began to think about the undertaking on which I was now fairly engaged.  When I came to consider it, it seemed a queer affair.  As I understood it, it amounted to this:—­Here was Mr. Gilverthwaite, a man that was a stranger in Berwick, and who appeared to have plenty of money and no business, suddenly getting a letter which asked him to meet a man, near midnight, and in about as lonely a spot as you could select out of the whole district.  Why at such a place, and at such an hour?  And why was this meeting of so much importance that Mr. Gilverthwaite, being unable to keep the appointment himself, must pay as much as ten pounds to another person to keep it for him?  What I had said to Maisie about Mr. Gilverthwaite having so much money that ten pounds was no more to him than ten pence to me was, of course, all nonsense, said just to quieten her fears and suspicions—­I knew well enough, having seen a bit of the world in a solicitor’s office for the past six years, that even millionaires don’t throw their money about as if pounds were empty peascods.  No!  Mr. Gilverthwaite was giving me that money because he thought that I, as a lawyer’s clerk, would see the thing in its right light as a secret and an important business, and hold my tongue about it.  And see it as a secret business I did—­for what else could it be that would make two men meet near an old ruin at midnight, when in a town where, at any rate, one of them was a stranger, and the other probably just as much so, they could have met by broad day at a more convenient trysting-place without anybody having the least concern in their doings?  There was strange and subtle mystery in all this, and the thinking and pondering it over led me before long to wondering about its first natural consequence—­who and what was the man I was now on my way to meet, and where on earth could he be coming from to keep a tryst at a place like that, and at that hour?

However, before I had covered three parts of that outward journey, I was to meet another man who, all unknown to me, was to come into this truly extraordinary series of events in which I, with no will of my own, was just beginning—­all unawares—­to be mixed up.  Taking it roughly, and as the crow flies, it is a distance of some nine or ten miles from Berwick town to Twizel Bridge on the Till, whereat I was to turn off from the main road and take another, a by-lane, that would lead me down by the old ruin,