There was no reason why any one should watch them out of the country, but they had adopted precautions against such watching.

They separated, disappeared, met again in the far North, in a sparsely-populated, lonely country of hill and dale, led there by an advertisement which they had seen in a local newspaper, met with by sheer chance in a Liverpool hotel.

There was an old-established business to sell as a going concern, in the dale town of Highmarket: the two ex-convicts bought it.

From that time they were Anthony Mallalieu and Milford Cotherstone, and the past was dead.
During the thirty years in which that past had been dead, Cotherstone had often heard men remark that this world of ours is a very small one, and he had secretly laughed at them.

To him and to his partner the world had been wide and big enough.