And there his speech failed him. He stopped as suddenly and completely as though his tongue had been paralyzed. The young man to whom he was addressing himself, with the attentive red-brown eyes in which gleamed a smile of intelligence, and the clean white apron tied round his waist, was Blase Pellet. They looked at one another in the full glare of the gas-light.
Blase was the first to speak. "How do you do, Mr. Raynor?"
"Is it you?" cried Frank, recovering himself somewhat. "Are you living here?"
"Since a week past," replied Blase.
"Why have you left Trennach?"
"I came up to better myself," said Blase demurely. "One hears great things of fortunes being made in London."
"And of being lost, Pellet," rejoined Frank.
"I can go back at any time," observed Blase. "Old Float would be only too glad to have me. The young fellow he has now in my place is not me, Float writes word. Float will have to attend to business a little more himself now, and I expect it will not suit him."
Vouchsafing no answer to this, Frank left the order he had gone in to give, and passed out of the shop, his mind in a very disagreeable state of ferment.
"He has come up here to spy upon me; he is watching my movements," said Frank to himself. "How did he know I was here—in this part of London?—how did he find it out?" A positive conviction, that it was utterly useless to try to evade Blase Pellet, had taken sudden possession of him; that he had been tracking him all along by the means of spies and emissaries, and had now come to do it in person. He felt that if he were to sail away over the seas and set up his tent in an African desert, or on the shores of some remote fastness of the Indian Empire, or amidst the unexplored wilds of a prairie, he should see Blase Pellet in another tent, side by side with him, the next morning.