On that the two friends parted. Peter hurried on after the little reformer, and Varney, turning, continued his way down Main Street toward the river and the Cypriani, not entirely displeased, after all, that Peter had found some congenial diversion for the evening.
The street was almost a desert. If the unmistakable sounds of revelry by night meant anything, nearly the whole population was behind him in the Ottoman bar. But in the middle of the next block, two ragged men, standing idly and talking together, turned at the sounds of the young man's steps. One of them, revealed by a near-by shop-light, had straggly gray whiskers, vacant eyes, and a bad foolish mouth. Both of them stared at Varney with marked intentness. He had to go quite out of his way to get round them.
"They don't see strangers every day, I take it," he thought absently; and suddenly he cast an inquiring eye at the heavens.
The night, so shining half an hour before, was becoming heavily overcast. Clouds had rolled up from nowhere and blotted out the moon. About him the night breeze was freshening with a certain significance; and now unexpectedly there fell upon his ear the faint far rumble of thunder. Decidedly, there would be rain, and that right soon. Varney quickened his pace.
At the end of that quiet block he came upon a crimson-cheeked lady, somewhat past her first youth and over-plump for beauty, who was engaged in putting up the shutters at her mother's grocery establishment. Glancing around casually at his approach, her glance became transfixed into a stare.
"Well!" she exclaimed in surprise and not without coquettishness—"if it ain't Mr. Ferris!"
"If it ain't Mr. Ferris—what then?" asked Varney. "For, madam, I assure you that it ain't."
The woman, taken aback by this denial, only stared and had no reply ready. But the young man, walking on, was set to thinking by this second encounter, and presently he mused: "I'm somebody's blooming double, that's what. I wonder whose."
And on that word, as though to get an answer to his speculation, he suddenly halted and turned.
He had now progressed nearly a block from the buxom young woman of the grocery. For some time, even before that meeting, he had been aware of light, steady footsteps behind him on the dark street, gaining on him. By this time they had come very near; and now as he wheeled sharply, with a vague anticipation of Peter's "old duck in a felt hat," he found himself face to face with quite a different figure—that of a thin young man whom he recognized.