At six o'clock on the following afternoon, a man dressed in a dark overcoat, with a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes stood nonchalantly by the curb near where the buses stop at Regent Street slapping his hand gently with a folded copy of the Westminster Gazette.
That none should mistake his Liberal reading, he stood as near as possible to a street lamp and so arranged himself and his attitude that the minimum of light should fall upon his face and the maximum upon that respectable organ of public opinion. Soon after six he saw the girl approaching, out of the tail of his eye, and strolled off to meet her. To his surprise she passed him by and he was turning to follow when an unfriendly hand gripped him by the arm.
“Mr. Fisher, I believe,” said a pleasant voice.
“What do you mean?” said the man, struggling backward.
“Are you going quietly!” asked the pleasant Superintendent Mansus, “or shall I take my stick to you'?”
Mr. Fisher thought awhile.
“It's a cop,” he confessed, and allowed himself to be hustled into the waiting cab.
He made his appearance in T. X.'s office and that urbane gentleman greeted him as a friend.
“And how's Mr. Fisher!” he asked; “I suppose you are Mr. Fisher still and not Mr. Harry Gilcott, or Mr. George Porten.”
Fisher smiled his old, deferential, deprecating smile.