Harris could not penetrate the ten-fold barrier; but he lay in wait; watched from some coign every Royal exit and entrance, careful that Hogarth never saw his face; and he cherished the knife-edge.
One night, four days before the debate, he stood by the Green Park railings, listless, smoking, when—he started: saw a hurried figure come out—face muffled—Hogarth!—alone.
Hogarth walked a little, entered a cab; Harris, in another, shadowed him.
Down Piccadilly, the Hammersmith Road, into the Addison: Hogarth alighted; Harris followed.
Now, at this time Hogarth had a spy, who presented him reports of the doings of Rebekah Frankl—a species of literature which the Regent found agreeable; and, as for two days Rebekah had, for some reason, been at a villa of Addison Road, this escapade of the Lord Regent was motived by his hope of catching there some glimpse of her, the house being small, he having seized his first chance of secret escape from state-affairs near midnight: and behind him, like the shadow of death, stole the assassin.
Hogarth, going soft up to the house, leaned aside from the frontage steps to peer; but Venetian blinds barred him from the least sight of the interior, though he could hear sounds, strange sounds, as of wailing; and, as the villa was in the midst of quite a spacious ground, well grown with trees and shrubberies, he stole round to the back, peered into an open door level with the garden, and within saw a doorway of twilight in the midst of darkness; had hoped to see a servant, who might talk gossip, or even contrive him sight of the Sacred Body; had ready bribe in hand: but nobody there. So, after some hesitation, he entered; and Harris, just then come to the house-corner on tiptoe, discerned him go in, ran on hot bricks to the door, and now distinctly saw Hogarth, who had passed through a kitchen, standing on three wooden steps before a doorway which framed a faint light in the room beyond.
On which a shivering of eagerness, quick as winking sheet-lightning, shook Harris' right knee.
Hogarth, meantime, having seen the chamber before him empty, in his headlong way had entered, and the guess now in Harris' mind was this: “It's a girl: a night out”....
He hesitated, Hogarth being once within the house and lost to him, but after some minutes dared to follow.
Hogarth, meantime, had seen that the light came from a death-taper, with which was a vessel of water for ceremonial purification, and a napkin, here being all the preparations for tahara (washing); and suddenly, in a near room, arose the clamorous dole of shivah (the seven mourning-days), Rachel weeping for her children, because they are not: a Jew was dead: “shema, Yisrael...”: and this explained Rebekah's stay there, for the bereaved may not leave the house. A peer at the bed—a covered face—pierced him with a compunction like shame: here was kodesh, and he a desecrator with his earthy passion: so he turned to beat a retreat by the way he had come—when a faint sound that way, made by Harris; and, instead, he leapt lightly through a window five feet above the garden.