I had changed my mind about her. She was better than her surroundings; her dress was costlier than the neighbourhood could buy. She was a false coin, which would not stand the test of a ring.
When she turned the corner of the street I let myself out by the front door, and followed her, my umbrella acting as a screen. When I reached the corner of the street she had vanished. There was a public-house a hundred yards away, into which she might have gone, so I went to it, and glanced into the bar over the frosted half of the window. A man was sitting on a barrel, playing on an asthmatical accordion, so wheezy and broken-winded it could not get through more than three bars of a tune without a rest. Three men, with pewter pots before them, were thumping some knotty arguments into a table. The lady wasn't there, evidently, so I went on, but seeing the private door ajar, I pushed it open a few inches. A jar suggests a pot of something. I was about to go in when I pulled myself up, just in time, for the lady was at a little square hole in the wall which communicated with the bar, and at that moment was slipping a bottle into her basket. On second thoughts, after watching for an opportunity, I went into the passage, and then into the parlour as if I were walking between eggs. The plot was developing. It was hatching.
In a few minutes the lady had bought what she wanted and went away, with me at her heels. I nearly trod on her skirt, so eager was I to keep her in sight. She did not go in the direction of the house she had first left, but went farther from it, probably to make more purchases. When she was at a safe distance I followed. There she turned into a shop, which I knew was a grocer's when I saw some soap boxes on the pavement, and a swinging sign with a big T and a teapot on it, so that the lettered might read and the unlettered might see what was sold within. A grocer's shop is like a salmon basket, having only one way out. Not like a public-house, whose ways in and out are many and crooked. The lady must come out sometime, so I could wait. I went into a right-of-way, and showed about a hair-breadth of my right eye in the direction of the shop.
When my patience was nearly all jettisoned I heard the sharp ting of a bell, and the lady came out of the shop. She was coming my way. I suddenly became absorbed in searching for an imaginary copper, which any one might suppose I was groping for in the gutter; my back toward the mouth of the right-of-way, my big body sticking in its gullet, my head nearly touching the water, while my telescopic eyes watched between my ankles for the transit of Venus.
When the blood had all run to my head, and my heart was throbbing like a water-lifter, the lady made her appearance, and gave a start when she saw me in this extraordinary attitude. She stared and better stared, and would have looked me out of countenance if there had been more of it visible. I was in a downright dilemma. When she had satisfied her curiosity she went on, and I slowly became an upright detective, or as nearly so as the business will allow.
I reached the end of the right-of-way as quickly as I could, and looked down the street, expecting to see the woman (I drop the term lady, for I was beginning to take her down a peg), but did not see her. She could not have reached the corner at a walking pace. She must have run like the wind. Perhaps she thought I was a madman, and would chase her.
"All right," I said, "I can run as fast as you," so I stretched myself, like a piece of india-rubber, and bounded along till I drew myself in at the corner. She was nowhere to be seen. There wasn't a figure in the landscape. She was rubbed out of the drawing—erased, by Jove!