In the meantime he was entering a belt of ugly industrial country.  Now and then the reflected glare of a furnace quivered in the sky; tall chimney-stacks and mounds of refuse showed faintly in the dark, and he passed clusters of fiercely burning lights and dull red fires.  He supposed they marked pithead banks and coke-ovens; but pushed on steadily towards the west.  He wanted to put some distance between himself and Newcastle before he stopped.

After a time a row of lights twinkled ahead and, getting nearer, he saw chimneys, dark skeleton towers of timber, and jets of steam behind the houses.  It was a colliery village, and when he passed the first lamps he vacantly noticed the ugliness of the place.  The small, grimy houses were packed as close as they could be got, the pavement was covered with black mud, and the air filled with acrid smoke.  Presently, however, he came to a pretentious hotel, built of glaring red brick and ornamented with sooty paint.  He wondered what accounted for its being planted there; but it offered shelter for the night and he went in.

He admitted that he had slept in worse places than the room he was shown, although it looked far from comfortable, but the supper he got was good, and he afterwards entered a small room behind the bar.  There was a bright fire, near which he sat down when Pete went away.  The strain he had borne had brought its reaction; he felt tired and slack.  There was another room across the passage, and he smelt rank tobacco and heard voices speaking a harsh dialect and the tramp of heavy boots on boards.  The door was open and men with curiously pale faces that did not look clean passed now and then.  Foster thought they were colliers and he had nothing to fear from them.

He had two or three companions, who sat round a small table and seemed by their talk to belong to a football committee.  The landlord treated them with some deference, as if they were important people, but Foster wished they would go.  He wanted to examine the letters, but thought it safer to wait until he was alone, since inquiries might afterwards be made about him.  At length the footballers went way, and shutting the door, he turned his chair so that he could see anybody who came in, without looking round.  It was satisfactory to note that the table would be between him and a new-comer.

Before opening the letters, he tried to recollect what had happened in Graham’s office.  The fellow sat in front of a desk with a row of pigeon-holes and sides that prevented Foster’s noting exactly what he did after he began to write.  In consequence, Foster could not tell if he had put anything except the letters in the envelopes, although he had taken some papers from the safe.  It looked as if Graham had not meant him to see and had not trusted him altogether from the beginning.  Now he probably knew he was an impostor, although this was not quite certain.  Foster took out the envelopes, and broke the seal of the first, which was addressed to Daly, without hesitation.