Clothes had a fascination for Archie.  Another man, in similar circumstances, might have hurried over his toilet; but Archie, faced by a difficult choice of ties, rather strung the thing out.  He selected a specimen which did great credit to the taste of Mr. Moon, evidently one of our snappiest dressers, found that it did not harmonise with the deeper meaning of the tweed suit, removed it, chose another, and was adjusting the bow and admiring the effect, when his attention was diverted by a slight sound which was half a cough and half a sniff; and, turning, found himself gazing into the clear blue eyes of a large man in uniform, who had stepped into the room from the fire-escape.  He was swinging a substantial club in a negligent sort of way, and he looked at Archie with a total absence of bonhomie.

“Ah!” he observed.

“Oh, there you are!” said Archie, subsiding weakly against the chest of drawers.  He gulped.  “Of course, I can see you’re thinking all this pretty tolerably weird and all that,” he proceeded, in a propitiatory voice.

The policeman attempted no analysis of his emotions, He opened a mouth which a moment before had looked incapable of being opened except with the assistance of powerful machinery, and shouted a single word.

“Cassidy!”

A distant voice gave tongue in answer.  It was like alligators roaring to their mates across lonely swamps.

There was a rumble of footsteps in the region of the stairs, and presently there entered an even larger guardian of the Law than the first exhibit.  He, too, swung a massive club, and, like his colleague, he gazed frostily at Archie.

“God save Ireland!” he remarked.

The words appeared to be more in the nature of an expletive than a practical comment on the situation.  Having uttered them, he draped himself in the doorway like a colossus, and chewed gum.

“Where ja get him?” he enquired, after a pause.

“Found him in here attimpting to disguise himself.”

“I told Cap. he was hiding somewheres, but he would have it that he’d beat it down th’ escape,” said the gum-chewer, with the sombre triumph of the underling whose sound advice has been overruled by those above him.  He shifted his wholesome (or, as some say, unwholesome) morsel to the other side of his mouth, and for the first time addressed Archie directly.  “Ye’re pinched!” he observed.

Archie started violently.  The bleak directness of the speech roused him with a jerk from the dream-like state into which he had fallen.  He had not anticipated this.  He had assumed that there would be a period of tedious explanations to be gone through before he was at liberty to depart to the cosy little lunch for which his interior had been sighing wistfully this long time past; but that he should be arrested had been outside his calculations.  Of course, he could put everything right eventually; he could call witnesses to his character and the purity of