Had it, then, for all his timely help, come to this, and was she driven to beg upon the streets, her little Gracie the lure to public charity? He was perplexed, vaguely dissatisfied, at a loss how to act, when he suddenly perceived a friend of his coming round the corner from Throgmorton Street. The young fellow paused a moment to slip a sixpence into the child’s hand before he came on. As he approached, Gilead accosted him, and, after greetings and a commonplace or two, remarked pleasantly:—
“That was mistaken charity, you know, Robson. You should have insisted on your matchbox in exchange.”
The other stared a moment, gathered, and laughed.
“O, that!” he said. “It’s one’s instinctive homage, I suppose, to a lovely face and a soft voice—the two best things in nature.”
“I daresay. And doesn’t she know and trade on it, too.”
“Well, if you put it that way, to quite a respectable tune, I should say. The two are familiar figures at that corner—have been for some time. They catch the drift there, you see, from a dozen golden ways. It’s a good pitch.”
“So I should think. Is anything known about them?”
“Not that I’m aware. It’s the mystery does the business, you see. They’re there as regular as clockwork from ten to four, and then they go. I’ve noticed them a dozen times, and they always move off on the stroke.”
Gilead, after parting with the young gentleman, grew so restless over the non-reappearance of his other friend, that in the end he left a message for him with the chauffeur, and, stopping a taxicab, drove back to the office. Arrived there, he instantly despatched in the same vehicle a member of his staff to Gospel Oak, with directions to the man to make exhaustive enquiries. He was already quite prepared for the result, and expressed no surprise when informed that there was no such place in Gospel Oak as Garden Lane, and consequently no Myrtle Villa, and, by inference, no Mrs Nightingale. Her ‘complaint,’ it was evident, dated from other and less righteous groves. He prepared, very stern and quietly wrathful, to act upon that assumption.
Fortunately for his purpose the weather, though it did not yet rain, was sufficiently threatening to justify a waterproof. He selected one with a very high turn-up collar, in which he muffled the lower part of his face. A cap pulled low down over his eyes completed a sort of disguise which he had no doubt would prove efficient. A quarter to four that same afternoon saw him posted in Threadneedle Street at a point whence, from amidst the hurrying throng, he could easily watch the movements of the woman and child, who were still stationary in their place at the street corner.