"Then, while you are gone, I shall confide in your friend the policeman."
Miles uttered a curse, and led the way across the road and straight on. There were no lamps in the road they entered now—no houses, no lights of any kind—but on the right a tall hedge, and on the left trim posts and rails, with fields beyond. They walked on for some minutes in silence, which was at length broken by Miles's unwelcome visitor.
"It's no sort o' use you being in a hurry," said he. "I've found you out; why not make the best of it?"
"What am I to do for you?" asked Miles, as smoothly as though the man by his side were an ordinary highway beggar.
"You'll see in good time. Sorry I've put you to inconvenience, but if you weren't passing for what you ain't you wouldn't feel it so; so you see, Ned Ryan, playing the gent has its drawbacks. Now, after me having crossed the whole blessed world to speak to you, it would be roughish if you refused me your best ear; now wouldn't it?"
"You have just landed, then?" said Miles; and added, after a pause, "I hoped you were dead."
"Thanks," returned the other, in the tone of coarse irony that he had employed from the beginning. "Being one as returns good for evil, I don't mind saying I was never so glad as when I clapped eyes on you yesterday—alive and safe."
"Yesterday! Where?"
"Never mind where. But I ain't just landed—Oh, no!"
Suddenly Miles stopped short in his walk. They had entered again the region of lights and houses; the road was no longer dark and lonely; it had intersected the highroad that leads to Kingston, and afterwards bent in curves to the right; now its left boundary was the white picket-fence of the railway, and, a hundred yards beyond, a cluster of bright lights indicated Teddington station.