WILLIAM TURNED AND FOLLOWED, CREEPING ALONG
THE SHADOW OF THE HEDGE, BENT ALMOST DOUBLE.
He met a man coming up the road from the station, carrying a black bag. William glared at him suspiciously. A bag! Of course a burglar would need a bag. Somewhat startled by William's stern, condemnatory expression, the man turned round again! William scowled still more. A guilty conscience! That was what made him turn round like that! He recognised, doubtless, the expression of a detective. Jumble barked excitedly, and wagged his tail. Even Jumble suspected something.
William turned and followed, creeping along in the shadow of the hedge, bent almost double. The man turned round again uneasily. William followed him till he saw him enter a pair of large gates by the roadside and go up to a fair-sized house with large bow-windows. William, with pride and determination writ large upon his freckled face, took a piece of chalk from his pocket and made a cross upon the stone gatepost. He had very neatly, and almost under the master's eye, removed the chalk from his master's desk at school that morning for the purpose. Becoming absorbed in his task, he turned the cross into a spider, and then into a shrimp. A few minutes later, inspired now purely by Art for Art's sake, he was adding a tree and a house, when he was roughly and ignominiously ordered off by a passing policeman. With a glance of crushing dignity, he obeyed.
If only that policeman knew——
******
That night, William, after retiring for the night, dressed himself completely, donned a dressing-gown in lieu of an overcoat, crept downstairs, and out of the back-door. He released Jumble on his way.
Together they crept up the drive to the house. The bow-window was open and the room was in darkness. The first thing William wanted to do was to find out what the inside of the house was like. If there were palms——
He climbed in by the open window, holding Jumble tightly beneath his dressing-gown. He went out of the room and across a hall past the open doorway of a room in which the man who had been carrying the bag was having dinner. Opposite him was (presumably) the adventuress—a little fatter than the adventuress in the play, and in a black evening dress instead of a red one. Still, you couldn't expect all adventuresses to look exactly the same. And she was wearing pearls. The pearls must be what the man had stolen last night and had been bringing home in his bag.
William stood in the doorway for a minute taking in the scene, then he went down to a room at the end of the passage—a glass room—palms! Ha! William had learnt all he wanted to know. He returned to the other room and out of the bow-window.
That evening Mr. Croombe, merchant in the city, turned to his wife, with a worried frown.