And Collins, stooping to pick up the half-sovereign that had been thrown him, felt that after all it was a poor price to receive for all, the jeers and gibes of the assembled onlookers.

“Smart capture, Bobby, wasn’t it?” sang out a deriding voice that set the crowd jeering anew.  “You’ll git promoted, you will!  See it in all the evenin’ papers—­oh, yus! ’’Orrible hand-to-hand struggle with a desperado.  Brave constable has ’arf a quid’s worth out of an infuriated ruffin!’ My hat! won’t your missis be proud when you take her to see that bloomin’ film?”

“Move on, now, move on!” said Collins, recovering his dignity, and asserting it with a vim.  “Look here, cabby, I don’t take it kind of you to laugh like that; they had you just as bad as they had me.  Blow that Frenchy!  She might have tipped me off before I made such an ass of myself.  I don’t say that I’d have done it so natural if I had known, but—­Hullo!  What’s that?  Blowed if it ain’t that blessed whistle again, and another crowd a-pelting this way; and—­no!—­yes, by Jupiter!—­a couple of Scotland Yard chaps with ’em.  My hat! what do you suppose that means?”

He knew in the next moment.  Panting and puffing, a crowd at their heels, and people from all sides stringing out from the pavement and trooping after them, the two “plain-clothes” men came racing through the grinning gathering and bore down on P.C.  Collins.

“Hullo, Smathers, you in this, too?” began he, his feelings softened by the knowledge that other arms of the law would figure on that film with him at the Alhambra to-night.  “Now, what are you after, you goat?  That French lady, or the red-headed party in the grey suit?”

“Yes, yes, of course I am.  You heard me signal you to head him off, didn’t you?” replied Smathers, looking round and growing suddenly excited when he realized that Collins was empty-handed, and that the red-headed man was not there.  “Heavens! you never let him get away, did you?  You grabbed him, didn’t you—­eh?”

“Of course I grabbed him.  Come out of it.  What are you giving me, you josser?” said Collins with a wink and a grin.  “Ain’t you found out even yet, you silly?  Why, it was only a faked-up thing—­the taking of a kinematograph picture for the Alhambra.  You and Petrie ought to have been here sooner and got your wages, you goats.  I got half a quid for my share when I let him go.”

Smathers and Petrie lifted up their voices in one despairing howl.

“When you what?” fairly yelled Smathers.  “You fool!  You don’t mean to tell me that you let them take you in like that—­those two?  You don’t mean to tell me that you had him—­had him in your hands—­and then let him go?  You did?  Oh! you seventy-seven kinds of a double-barrelled ass!  Had him—­think of it!—­had him, and let him go!  Did yourself out of a share in a reward of two hundred quid when you’d only to shut your hands and hold on to it!”

“Two hundred quid?  Two hun—­W-what are you talking about?  Wasn’t it true?  Wasn’t it a kinematograph picture, after all?”