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I discovered a few more inhabitants, but it added nothing to my comfort. They, too, stared at me and followed me about, until finally I ran back to the station and cried out in my heart for the four o’clock train.

About five o’clock it strolled up. I got in anywhere, without even troubling to look for Michael McCrane. If he should appear at C–, well and good, I would arrest him; if not, I would go home. For the present, at least, I would dismiss him from my mind and try to sleep.

I did try, but that was all. We passed station after station. Some we halted at, as it appeared, by accident; some we went past, and then, on second thoughts, pulled up and backed into. At last, as we ran through one of these places I fancied I detected in the gloaming the name C– painted up.

“Is that C–?” I asked of a fellow-traveller.

“It is so! You should have gone in the back of the train if you wanted to stop there.”

Missed again! I grew desperate. The train was crawling along at a foot’s pace; my fellow-traveller was not a formidable one. I opened the door and jumped out on to the line.

I was uninjured, and C– was not a mile away. If I ran I might still be there to meet the back of the train and Michael McCrane.

But as I began to run a grating sound behind me warned me that the train had suddenly pulled up, and a shout proclaimed that I was being pursued.

Half a dozen passengers and the guard–none of them pressed for time– joined in the hue and cry.

What it was all about I cannot imagine; all I know is that that evening, in the meadows near C–, a wretched Cockney, in a battered chimney-pot hat, and carrying an umbrella, was wantonly run to earth by a handful of natives, and that an hour later the same unhappy person was clapped in the village lock-up for the night as a suspicious character! It had all been tending to this. Fate had marked me for her own, and run me down at last. Perhaps I was a criminal after all, and did not know it. At any rate, I was too fatigued to care much what happened. I “reserved my defence,” as they say in the police courts, and resigned myself to spend the night as comfortably as possible in the comparative seclusion of a small apartment which, whatever may have been its defects, compared most favourably with the cabin in which I had lain the night before.

It was about ten o’clock next morning before I had an opportunity of talking my case over with the inspector, and suggesting to him he had better let me go. He, good fellow, at once fell in with my wishes, after hearing my statement, and in his anxiety to efface any unpleasant impressions, I suppose, proposed an adjournment to the “Hotel” to drink “siccess to the ould counthree.”

The proposed toast was not sufficiently relevant to the business I had on hand to allure me, so I made my excuses and hastened to the telegraph office to ascertain whether they had any message for me there.

They had. It was from my manager, as I expected; but the contents were astounding–

“Return at once. Robber captured here. Keep down expenses.”

It would be hard to say which of these three important sentences struck me as the most cruel. I think the last.

I was standing in the street, staring blankly at the missive, when I was startled beyond measure by feeling a hand on my shoulder, and a voice pronouncing my name–

“Samuels!”

It was Michael McCrane. But not the Michael McCrane I knew in the City, or the one I had seen going below on board the steamer. He wore a frock-coat and light trousers, lavender gloves, and a hat–glorious product of that identical box–in which you might see your own face. A rose was in his button-hole, his hair was brushed, his collar was white, and his chin was absolutely smooth.

“Whatever are you doing here?” he asked.

“Oh,” faltered I, for I was fairly overcome, both by my own misfortunes and his magnificent appearance, “nothing; only a–a little business run, you know, for the manager.”

“I didn’t know we had any customers in these parts.”

“Well no. But, I say, what are you doing here?”

“Business too,” said he–“grave business. By the way, Samuels, have you got any better clothes than these?”

Here was a question. And from Michael McCrane!

“Because,” he went on–and here he became embarrassed himself–“if you had–in fact, you’d do as you are, because you won’t have to wear your hat. What I mean is, that now you are here–I’d be awfully obliged if you’d be my best man–I’m to be married this morning. I say, there’s the bell beginning to ring. Come on, Samuels.”