“Why were you creeping in here?” she said.  “You are a thief, That’s it—­you are a thief.  Well, listen, there are five thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds in a little leather bag in his breast pocket!” She pointed down at the body.  “Five thousand pounds’ worth,” she said.

“Five thousand!” he gasped.  “Five thousand!”

The woman’s hand was on the door knob.  She opened the door and slipped out.  The lock clicked as she closed the door behind her.

CHAPTER VI.

A departure into art.

Nicholas Crips seated-himself on a warm stone, on a convenient boulder spread the contents of yesterday’s “Age.”  The “Age” contents on this occasion was the lunch of Mr. Nicholas Grips.  Nickie had been given the meal half-an-hour earlier by a kind soul in one of the suburbs, to whom he had pitifully presented his urgent need of sustenance of an inviting kind.  Very adroitly Nickie the Kid had dwelt upon his necessities, while impressing the lady’s with the eccentricities of a peculiarly capricious appetite.

It was the day after the distressing incident in Biggs’s Buildings.  Mr. Crips was no longer dressed in his clerical garments; they were carefully stowed away in a niche in a riverside quarry where he had long kept his wardrobe.  To-day Nickie was dressed in the rags of a simple mendicant.

The strongly melodramatic adventure the previous day did not seem to distress Mr. Crips; he ate heartily, but had only reached his second course, which was represented by the chicken, when his attention was attracted by a very lean, very pale, hollow-eyed, sad stranger who had seated himself on a sloping tree nearer the river, and was eyeing the banquet hungrily.

Nickie the Kid, was not selfish.  When his own needs were fairly met he could be generous with anybody’s property, even his own.  He tapped the chicken’s breastbone invitingly with his penknife, and addressed the stranger.

“May I offer you a little lunch, sir?” he said urbanely, with quite the air of a generous host.

The long, lean man shook his head in mute melancholy, but accepted the invitation as an offer of friendship, and approached nearer, seating himself on a rock facing Nickie’s banquet.

“No, thanks, boss,” he said.

“You’ll forgive me,” said Nickie, after wrenching a mouthful from the back of the pullet, “but you look famished.”

“I am,” answered the stranger.

“Well, help yourself.  These garlic sausage sandwiches are superb.  Try the beer.”

Nickie pushed his jam tin forward.

The other shook his head very regretfully.

“I mustn’t,” he said.  “Fact is, my livin’ depends on me not eatin’, an’ I’ve got a wife an’ kiddies to support.”

Nickie paused with the bottle half-way to his mouth.

“Your living depends on your not eating?” he ejaculated.  “What, do you earn anything by starving, then?  By Jove, that’s a quaint idea.”