"He is gone that way," he muttered, "and the other knows it. So, too, do I know it now. Between us we shall run the fox to ground."
Thus they went on: the first man invisible to the last, but the second kept well in view by that last; then suddenly the latter paused.
He paused, with a muttered imprecation; paused while withdrawing himself into the deep, dark stoop of an old house.
"He has missed him! Missed him! He is coming back. The spy has escaped. Ah! ah! the chance is gone. If he has missed him how shall I ever find him?"
A moment later this watcher started, while giving utterance to some sound that was, now, neither imprecation nor exclamation, but, in truth, a gasp. A gasp full of astonishment, nevertheless; a gasp that surprise seemed to have choked back into his throat.
For he who was coming back was not the tall, handsomely apparelled young man who had started forth in pursuit of him whom he had denounced as a renegade spy; but, instead, another. An older man, one who held a dark cloak across his features from which some wisp of a grey beard projected; one who, as he came swiftly towards that stoop where the man was hidden, looked back and back, and back again, and glinted a pair of dark eyes up and down the street as though in mortal fear.
"He's mine," the watcher whispered to himself. "He's mine. He will spy no more."
As he so spoke, the man who was returning drew near the stoop, his footsteps fell outside it. He was before it!
* * * * * *
"How did I miss him? What twist or turn did the vagabond take whereby to avoid me?" Bevill pondered the next morning, as now the soft, roseate hue of the sun suffused the skies that, half an hour before, had been daffodil and, before that, lit by the moon. For it was four o'clock now, and the daylight had dawned on one of the last remaining days of May.