3. CHAPTER III.
NO. 27 LIMEHOUSE ROAD.
It was a hot midsummer evening. Limehouse
Road was deserted save by dust and a few rattling
butchers' carts, and the bell of the muffin and crumpet
man. A commodious mansion which stood on
the right of the road as you enter Pultneyville surrounded
by stately poplars and a high fence surmounted
by a chevaux de frise of broken glass, looked
to the passing and footsore pedestrian like the
genius of seclusion and solitude. A bill announcing
in the usual terms that the house was to let, hung
from the bell at the servants' entrance.
As the shades of evening closed, and the long
shadows of the poplars stretched across the road, a
man carrying a small kettle stopped and gazed, first
at the bill and then at the house. When he had
reached the corner of the fence, he again stopped and
looked cautiously up and down the road. Apparently
satisfied with the result of his scrutiny, he deliberately
sat himself down in the dark shadow of
the fence, and at once busied himself in some employment,
so well concealed as to be invisible to the gaze
of passers-by. At the end of an hour he retired cautiously.
But not altogether unseen. A slim young man,
with spectacles and note-book, stepped from behind
a tree as the retreating figure of the intruder was
lost in the twilight, and transferred from the fence
to his note-book the freshly stenciled inscription—
“S—T—1860—X.”
