down on his knees.  I didn’t know what caper you was up to,—­you might be bum bailiffs for all I knew!—­and I supposed that he wasn’t so anxious to let you in as you might be to get inside, and that was why he didn’t take no notice of your knocking, while all the while he kept a eye on what was going on.  When you goes round to the back, up he gets again, and I reckoned that he was going to meet yer, and perhaps give yer a bit of his mind, and that presently I should hear a shindy, or that something would happen.  But when you pulls up the blind downstairs, to my surprise back he come once more.  He shoves his old nose right through the smash in the pane, and wags his old head at me like a chattering magpie.  That didn’t seem to me quite the civil thing to do,—­I hadn’t done no harm to him; so I gives you the office, and lets you know that he was there.  But for you to say that he wasn’t there, and never had been,—­blimey! that cops the biscuit.  If he wasn’t there, all I can say is I ain’t here, and my ’orse ain’t here, and my cab ain’t neither,—­damn it!—­the house ain’t here, and nothing ain’t!’

He settled himself on his perch with an air of the most extreme ill usage,—­he had been standing up to tell his tale.  That the man was serious was unmistakable.  As he himself suggested, what inducement could he have had to tell a lie like that?  That he believed himself to have seen what he declared he saw was plain.  But, on the other hand, what could have become—­in the space of fifty seconds!—­of his ‘old gent’?

Atherton put a question.

‘What did he look like,—­this old gent of yours?’

’Well, that I shouldn’t hardly like to say.  It wasn’t much of his face I could see, only his face and his eyes,—­and they wasn’t pretty.  He kept a thing over his head all the time, as if he didn’t want too much to be seen.’

‘What sort of a thing?’

’Why,—­one of them cloak sort of things, like them Arab blokes used to wear what used to be at Earl’s Court Exhibition,—­you know!’

This piece of information seemed to interest my companions more than anything he had said before.

‘A burnoose do you mean?’

’How am I to know what the thing’s called?  I ain’t up in foreign languages,—­’tain’t likely!  All I know that them Arab blokes what was at Earl’s Court used to walk about in them all over the place,—­sometimes they wore them over their heads, and sometimes they didn’t.  In fact if you’d asked me, instead of trying to make out as I sees double, or things what was only inside my own noddle, or something or other, I should have said this here old gent what I’ve been telling you about was a Arab bloke,—­when he gets off his knees to sneak away from the window, I could see that he had his cloak thing, what was over his head, wrapped all round him.’

Mr Lessingham turned to me, all quivering with excitement.

‘I believe that what he says is true!’