And behold, the unconscious victim knew all about it, and had politely interfered when a couple of unromantic “Bobbies” threatened the performance by tumbling the stalking avenger into the gutter!  They had knocked my tragedy into harlequinade as easily as you might bash in a hat; and my enemy had refined the cruelty of it by coming to the rescue and ironically restarting the poor play on lines of comedy.  I saw too late that I ought to have refused his help, to have assaulted the constable and been hauled to the police-station.  Not an impressive wind-up, to be sure; but less humiliating than this!  Even so, Gervase might have trumped the poor card by following with a gracious offer to bail me out!

As it was, I had put the whip into his hand, and must follow him like a cur.  The distance he kept assured me that the similitude had not escaped him.  He strode on without deigning a single glance behind, still in cold derision presenting me his broad back and silently challenging me to shoot.  And I followed, hating him worse than ever, swearing that the last five minutes should not be forgotten, but charged for royally when the reckoning came to be paid.

I followed thus up Conduit Street, up Regent Street, and across the Circus.  The frost had deepened and the mud in the roadway crackled under our feet.  At the Circus I began to guess, and when Gervase struck off into Great Portland Street, and thence by half-a-dozen turnings northward by east, I knew to what house he was leading me.

At the entrance of the side street in which it stood he halted and motioned me to come close.

“I forget,” he said with a jerk of his thumb, “if you still have the entry.  These people are not particular, to be sure.”

“I have not,” I answered, and felt my cheeks burning.  He could not see this, nor could I see the lift of his eyebrows as he answered—­

“Ah?  I hadn’t heard of it. . . .  You’d better step round by the mews, then.  You know the window, the one which opens into the passage leading to Pollox Street.  Wait there.  It may be ten minutes before I can open.”

I nodded.  The house was a corner one, between the street and a by-lane tenanted mostly by cabmen; and at the back of it ran the mews where they stabled their horses.  Half-way down this mews a narrow alley cut across it at right angles:  a passage un-frequented by traffic, known only to the stablemen, and in the daytime used only by their children, who played hop-scotch on the flagged pavement, where no one interrupted them.  You wondered at its survival—­from end to end it must have measured a good fifty yards—­in a district where every square foot of ground fetched money; until you learned that the house had belonged, in the ’twenties, to a nobleman who left a name for eccentric profligacy, and who, as owner of the land, could afford to indulge his humours.  The estate since his death was in no position to afford money for alterations, and the present tenants of the house found the passage convenient enough.