It was about nine o’clock that the two men and the one woman sat down to supper upstairs.  The children had been put to bed in the kitchen as usual, after Jimmie had informed his mother that the clergyman had been round no less than three times since four o’clock to inquire after the vanished lodger.  He was a little tearful at being put to bed at such an unusually early hour, as Mr. Parham-Carter, it appeared, had promised him no less than sixpence if he would come round to the clergy-house within five minutes after the lodger’s return, and it was obviously impossible to traverse the streets in a single flannel shirt.

His mother dismissed it all as nonsense.  She told him that Frankie was not coming back at all—­that he wasn’t a good young man, and had run away without paying mother her rent.  This made the situation worse than ever, as Jimmie protested violently against this shattering of his ideal, and his mother had to assume a good deal of sternness to cover up her own tenderness of feeling.  But she, too—­though she considered the flight of the two perfectly usual—­was conscious of a very slight sense of disappointment herself that it should have been this particular young man who had done it.

Then she went upstairs again to supper.

(III)

The famous archway that gives entrance to the district of Hackney Wick seems, especially on a rainy night, directly designed by the Great Eastern Railway as a vantage ground for observant loafers with a desire to know every soul that enters or leaves Hackney Wick.  It is, of course, possible to, enter Hackney Wick by other ways—­it may be approached by the marshes, and there is, I think, another way round about half a mile to the east, under the railway.  But those ways have nothing whatever to do with people coming from London proper.  You arrive at Victoria Park Station; you turn immediately to the right and follow the pavement down, with the park on your left, until you come to the archway where the road unites with that coming from Homerton.  One is absolutely safe, therefore, assuming that one has not to deal with watchful criminals, in standing under the arch with the certitude that sooner or later, if you wait long enough, the man whom you expect to enter Hackney Wick will pass within ten yards of you.

Mr. Parham-Carter, of course, knew this perfectly well, and had, finally, communicated the fact to the other two quite early in the afternoon.  An elaborate system of watches, therefore, had been arranged, by which one of the three had been on guard continuously since three o’clock.  It was Jack who had had the privilege (if he had but known it) of observing Mr. Partington himself returning home to his family for Christmas, and it was Dick, who came on guard about five, who had seen the Major—­or, rather, what was to him merely a shabby and excited man—­leave and then return to the “Queen’s Arms” during his hour’s watch.