The fish-cart, helped by half a crown to the driver, took me past the outlying small-villadom, between long lines of workmen’s houses, to narrow cobbled lanes and the purlieus of great factories.  As soon as I saw the streets well crowded I got out and walked.  In my old clothes I must have appeared like some second-class bookie or seedy horse-coper.  The only respectable thing I had about me was my gold watch.  I looked at the time and found it half past five.

I wanted food and was casting about for an eating-house when I heard the purr of a motor-cycle and across the road saw the intelligent boy scout.  He saw me, too, and put on the brake with a sharpness which caused him to skid and all but come to grief under the wheels of a wool-wagon.  That gave me time to efface myself by darting up a side street.  I had an unpleasant sense that I was about to be trapped, for in a place I knew nothing of I had not a chance to use my wits.

I remember trying feverishly to think, and I suppose that my preoccupation made me careless.  I was now in a veritable slum, and when I put my hand to my vest pocket I found that my watch had gone.  That put the top stone on my depression.  The reaction from the wild burnout of the forenoon had left me very cold about the feet.  I was getting into the under-world again and there was no chance of a second Archie Roylance turning up to rescue me.  I remember yet the sour smell of the factories and the mist of smoke in the evening air.  It is a smell I have never met since without a sort of dulling of spirit.

Presently I came out into a market-place.  Whistles were blowing, and there was a great hurrying of people back from the mills.  The crowd gave me a momentary sense of security, and I was just about to inquire my way to the railway station when someone jostled my arm.

A rough-looking fellow in mechanic’s clothes was beside me.

‘Mate,’ he whispered.  ‘I’ve got summat o’ yours here.’  And to my amazement he slipped my watch into my hand.

‘It was took by mistake.  We’re friends o’ yours.  You’re right enough if you do what I tell you.  There’s a peeler over there got his eye on you.  Follow me and I’ll get you off.’

I didn’t much like the man’s looks, but I had no choice, and anyhow he had given me back my watch.  He sidled into an alley between tall houses and I sidled after him.  Then he took to his heels, and led me a twisting course through smelly courts into a tanyard and then by a narrow lane to the back-quarters of a factory.  Twice we doubled back, and once we climbed a wall and followed the bank of a blue-black stream with a filthy scum on it.  Then we got into a very mean quarter of the town, and emerged in a dingy garden, strewn with tin cans and broken flowerpots.  By a back door we entered one of the cottages and my guide very carefully locked it behind him.

He lit the gas and drew the blinds in a small parlour and looked at me long and quizzically.  He spoke now in an educated voice.