But when he wanted him he knew that he had only to exert the authority which the warrant gave him, and Johann Wilfer would be his obedient servant, as many better men were already.

The picture he intended—­through Mr. Harker—­to compel one of the firm’s wealthy clients to take as part of a loan, a well-known trick of the worst class of moneylenders.

Quite unconscious of the sword that hung over him, Mr. Wilfer, after a bout of hard drinking, went home, and it was in his drunken frenzy that he had struck Jessica.  She, bruised and frightened, fled into the streets, where Adrien Leroy found her.

Left to himself—­for his wife was away for a day or two—­Mr. Wilfer fell into a deep slumber, in which he remained for the rest of the evening.

Early for him, on the following morning he was roused by a loud knocking at his front door.  Now thoroughly sobered, he hurriedly dressed, stumbled down the rickety staircase, and opened the door, to himself confronted by Miss Ada Lester.  Her face was flushed, and the angry light Jasper Vermont had called up by his sneers at her vulgarity the previous evening still shone in her dark eyes.

“Where is the gal?” she asked abruptly.

“The gal!” he repeated, staring at her in stolid amazement.

“Yes—­Jessica!” retorted Miss Lester, her jewels flashing in a chance ray of sunlight which had found its way through the dingy court.  “Where is she?”

“She is not at home,” said Mr. Wilfer.  “She and Martha ’ave gone out for the day to Greenwich.  If you’d wrote a-sayin’ you was goin’ to call I’d have made ’em stay till you came.”

Miss Lester looked at him keenly.

“If you don’t believe me,” said Wilfer, “go upstairs and look at her room.”

Ada ran past him up the stairs, and quickly returned.

“It’s locked,” she said.

“Of course; she’s quite the lady—­keeps the keys ’erself,” sneered Johann.  “Look ’ere, ’ere’s her hat and coat; there’s one of ’er boots, so she must be comin’ back afore long.”

Miss Lester appeared convinced.  She breathed more freely, as if a weight had been taken off her mind.

“Here,” she said, putting some gold coins in his hand, “is something to make up for my troubling you.  But I was real anxious to know if everything was right with the gal.”

Wilfer—­debauched and demoralised by drink—­was disposed to look at the worst side of things; and from this point of view thought she meant the reverse of what she said.

“Would you be very much cut up,” he said slyly, “if she wasn’t able to trouble you any more or answer awkward questions, miss?”

She turned on him with a fierceness that made him recoil.

“If anything happens to that gal,” she shouted, “I’ll turn the police on you.  For, mind my words—­I mean them—­I shouldn’t have cared yesterday very much if I had learnt she was dead, but now I want her.  Do you hear?  I want her, and you take care she’s alive and ready when I come for her.”