He went home and sat in the dismantled dining-room with his head in his hands.  Newton never thought harder than this victim of circumstances, and yet no clearness came.  ‘It may be a defect in my intelligence,’ he cried, rising to his feet, ’but I cannot see that I am fairly used.  The bad luck I’ve had is a thing to write to The Times about; it’s enough to breed a revolution.  And the plain English of the whole thing is that I must have money at once.  I’m done with all morality now; I’m long past that stage; money I must have, and the only chance I see is Bent Pitman.  Bent Pitman is a criminal, and therefore his position’s weak.  He must have some of that eight hundred left; if he has I’ll force him to go shares; and even if he hasn’t, I’ll tell him the tontine affair, and with a desperate man like Pitman at my back, it’ll be strange if I don’t succeed.’

Well and good.  But how to lay hands upon Bent Pitman, except by advertisement, was not so clear.  And even so, in what terms to ask a meeting? on what grounds? and where?  Not at John Street, for it would never do to let a man like Bent Pitman know your real address; nor yet at Pitman’s house, some dreadful place in Holloway, with a trapdoor in the back kitchen; a house which you might enter in a light summer overcoat and varnished boots, to come forth again piecemeal in a market-basket.  That was the drawback of a really efficient accomplice, Morris felt, not without a shudder.  ’I never dreamed I should come to actually covet such society,’ he thought.  And then a brilliant idea struck him.  Waterloo Station, a public place, yet at certain hours of the day a solitary; a place, besides, the very name of which must knock upon the heart of Pitman, and at once suggest a knowledge of the latest of his guilty secrets.  Morris took a piece of paper and sketched his advertisement.

William bent Pitman, if this should meet the eye of, he will hear of something to his advantage on the far end of the main line departure platform, Waterloo Station, 2 to 4 P.M., Sunday next.

Morris reperused this literary trifle with approbation.  ‘Terse,’ he reflected.  ’Something to his advantage is not strictly true; but it’s taking and original, and a man is not on oath in an advertisement.  All that I require now is the ready cash for my own meals and for the advertisement, and—­no, I can’t lavish money upon John, but I’ll give him some more papers.  How to raise the wind?’

He approached his cabinet of signets, and the collector suddenly revolted in his blood.  ‘I will not!’ he cried; ’nothing shall induce me to massacre my collection—­rather theft!’ And dashing upstairs to the drawing-room, he helped himself to a few of his uncle’s curiosities:  a pair of Turkish babooshes, a Smyrna fan, a water-cooler, a musket guaranteed to have been seized from an Ephesian bandit, and a pocketful of curious but incomplete seashells.