"Where's Mr. Drayton," said one, panting from his run.
"Is that true, my lad?" the man asked, laying a hand on the boy's shoulder.
"He's gone to St. Pancras, sir. He's got to be there at midnight," said Jabez.
The boy had recognized the visitors, and was trembling.
"That was Drayton--the man that ran past us down the road," said one.
"Make sure of it," said the other. "Search the place; I'll wait for you here."
In two minutes more the men had left the house together.
A quarter of an hour later the night porter at the Hendon railway station saw a man run across the platform and leap into the up train just as the carriages were moving away. He remarked that the man was bareheaded, and wore his clothes awry, and that a rent near the collar of his long frieze ulster exposed a strip of red flannel lining. He thought he knew him.
The train had barely cleared the platform when two men ran up and came suddenly to a stand in front of the porter.
"That would be the 11:35," said the other, "to King's Cross. Did any one get into it here, porter?"
"Yes, sergeant--Drayton, of the Hawk and Heron," said the porter.
The cab that drove Mrs. Drayton into London carried with it a world of memories. Thought in her old head was like the dip of a sea-bird in the sea--now here, now there, now a straight flight, and now a backward swirl. As she rattled over the dark roads of Child Hill and the New End, she puzzled her confused brain to understand the business on which she had been sent. Why had the gentleman been brought out to Hendon? Why, being ill, was he so soon to be removed? Why, being removed, was he not put back into this cab, and driven to the station for Cumberland? What purpose could be served by sending her to the convent for the gentleman's wife, when the gentleman himself might have been driven there? Why was the lady in a convent? The landlady pursed up her lips and contracted her wrinkled brows in a vain endeavor to get light out of the gloom of these mysteries.
The thought of the gentleman lying ill at her house suggested many thoughts concerning her son. Paul was not her son, and his name was not Drayton. Whose son he was she never knew, and what his name was she had never heard. But she had fixed and done for him since he was a baby, and no mother could have loved a son more than she had loved her Paul. What a poor, puling little one he was, and how the neighbors used to shake their heads and say: