"What a brick you are!" said Constable Pond, extracting the cork with his teeth, and applying himself to the refreshment. "It's ever so much better than three-star. Here, take a pull yourself." She did. "Polly, you're a angel!"
She laughed, but did not dispute it, and they remained a short time in fond dalliance. A strange hour for Cupid's pranks, but that urchin has no conscience. Polly proposed to walk the beat with her husband all through the night, but this was such an alarming infringement of the regulations that he would not listen to it. So he escorted her to the end of his beat, and would have escorted her farther, but she would not listen to that.
"Can you find your way home?" he asked, in doubt.
"Blindfold," she answered promptly.
"You may as well have the empty bottle," he said. "Hold it by the neck, and if anybody comes up to you give him a crack on the head with it. Another kiss, Polly!"
As she walked away she blew on her bird-call every few yards, to which her husband did not fail to respond; and if desolation did not fall upon him when he could hear it no longer it was because of the impression which Polly's thoughtful love had produced upon him. "Good little woman," he said. "A regular trump, that's what she is." But a couple of hours' loneliness sent his spirits down again, and now he was seeking his brother-constable Applebee to cheer him up with the friendly word. With the advance of the night the fog continued to deepen, and he got into a state of muddle as to his whereabouts. His progress was painfully slow. The white mist blinded and deceived him; his footsteps were noiseless; and but for the striking of the hour from a neighbouring church he might reasonably have fancied that he was traversing a city of the dead.
"Saint Michael's Church," he soliloquised, with a feeling of relief. "I didn't hear it when it struck last. Where could I have been--and where am I now? It can't be fur off, though whether it's to the right of me or the left of me, or before me or behind me, I'll be hanged if I can tell. What street am I in--Riley Street or Silver Street? If it's Riley Street I ought to come upon Applebee in a minute or two, unless he's at the other end of the beat. If it's Silver Street I'll have to tack."
That he should be puzzled was not to be wondered at, for the streets he named were so precisely alike in every detail and feature that they might have been turned out of one mould. Their frontage was the same, their height was the same, their depth was the same, and each had the same number of rooms of exactly the same shape and dimensions, and the same number of chimney pots placed in exactly the same positions. When this mathematical demon of architecture receives its death-blow a joy will be added to existence.
While Constable Pond stood debating whether to tack or creep straight on he saw in the distance what might be likened to a dead star--the misty glimmering of a despondent light; and on the chance of its indicating the presence of Constable Applebee he boldly challenged it.
"Hallo, there!" he cried.