Then he screwed round on his heel and went back into the mist and loneliness of the heath, and walked, and walked, and walked.

Afterward--long afterward: when the night was getting old and the town was going to sleep, he, too, fared forth in quest of a taxi, and finding one went _his_ way as she had gone hers.
In the neighbourhood of Bond Street--now a place of darkness and slow-tramping policemen--he dismissed the taxi and continued the journey along Piccadilly afoot.

It was close to one o'clock when he came at length to Clarges Street and swung into it from the Piccadilly end, and moved on in the direction of the house which sheltered him and his secrets together.

But, though he walked with apparent indifference, his eye was ever on the lookout for some chance watcher in the windows of the other houses; for "Captain Horatio Burbage" was supposed, in the neighbourhood, to be a superannuated seaman who maintained a bachelor establishment with the aid of an elderly housekeeper and a deaf-and-dumb maid of all work.
But no one was on the watch to-night; and it was only when he came at last to the pillared portico of his own residence that he found any sign of life from one end of the street to the other.

He did find it then, however; for the boy, Dollops, was sitting huddled up on the top step with the thick shadow of the portico making a safe screen for him.
He had made good use of the two half-crowns, for he had not only feasted--and was feasting still: on a bag of winkles and a saveloy--but was washed and brushed and had gone to the length of a shoe-shine and a collar.
"Been waitin' since eleven o'clock, sir," he said, getting up and pulling his forelock as Cleek appeared.