‘Make my service to your mistress,’ said Toole, ’and say I’ll look in on her in five minutes, if she’ll admit me.’  And Lowe and the doctor walked on to the garden, and so side by side down to the river’s bank.

‘Hey!—­look at that,’ said Toole, with a start, in a hard whisper; and he squeezed Lowe’s arm very hard, and looked as if he saw a snake.

It was the impression in the mud of the same peculiar foot-print they had tracked so far in the park.  There was a considerable pause, during which Lowe stooped down to examine the details of the footmark.

‘Hang it—­you know—­poor Mrs. Nutter—­eh?’ said Toole, and hesitated.

‘We must make a note of that—­the thing’s important,’ said Mr. Lowe, sternly fixing his gray eye upon Toole.

‘Certainly, Sir,’ said the doctor, bridling; ’I should not like to be the man to hit him—­you know; but it is remarkable—­and, curse it, Sir, if called on, I’ll speak the truth as straight as you, Sir—­every bit, Sir.’

And he added an oath, and looked very red and heated.

The magistrate opened his pocket-book, took forth the pattern sole, carefully superimposed it, called Toole’s attention, and said—­

‘You see.’

Toole nodded hurriedly; and just then the maid came out to ask him to see her mistress.

‘I say, my good woman,’ said Lowe; ’just look here.  Whose foot-print is that—­do you know it?’

‘Oh, why, to be sure I do.  Isn’t it the master’s brogues?’ she replied, frightened, she knew not why, after the custom of her kind.

‘You observe that?’ and he pointed specially to the transverse line across the heel.  ‘Do you know that?’

The woman assented.

‘Who made or mended these shoes?’

’Bill Heaney, the shoemaker, down in Martin’s-row, there—­’twas he made them, and mended them, too, Sir.’

So he came to a perfect identification, and then an authentication of his paper pattern; then she could say they were certainly the shoes he wore on Friday night—­in fact, every other pair he had were then on the shoe-stand on the lobby.  So Lowe entered the house, and got pen and ink, and continued to question the maid and make little notes; and the other maid knocked at the parlour door with a message to Toole.

Lowe urged his going; and somehow Toole thought the magistrate suspected him of making signs to his witness, and he departed ill at ease; and at the foot of the stairs he said to the woman—­

’You had better go in there—­that stupid Lynn is doing her best to hang your master, by Jove!’

And the woman cried—­

‘Oh, dear, bless us!’

Toole was stunned and agitated, and so with his hand on the clumsy banister he strode up the dark staircase, and round the little corner in the lobby, to Mrs. Nutter’s door.

’Oh, Madam, ‘twill all come right, be sure,’ said Toole, uncomfortably, responding to a vehement and rambling appeal of poor Mrs. Nutter’s.