It appeared to Colin, if not absolutely impossible, at least the height of improbability, that the veritable Jerry Clink himself could be there in his own proper person. There, however, he assuredly was; a fact which his grandson's eyes soon confirmed, when he peeped round a projecting corner of the room, and beheld the man with whom he had recently had so fierce a struggle sitting in his wet clothes, and minus his coat, within a very short distance of him.
For reasons sufficiently obvious, and to prevent any farther public demonstration of Jerry's temper, Colin suffered him to take his meal in quiet, and afterwards his departure, without making his own presence known to him. Anxious, however, not wholly to lose sight of him again, as the liberation of Mr. Woodruff appeared very singularly to depend upon him, though in a manner yet unaccounted for, Colin quietly followed and dodged him along the streets, until he observed him enter an old clothes shop in the Goswell-road, from which, after a convenient lapse of time, he again emerged with a coat on,--new to the present possessor, though old in the opinion of the gentleman whose shoulders it had previously adorned.
In this manner he followed unperceived in the old man's wake, but did not venture to accost him until, after a very considerable walk, he pulled up for refreshment at a small deserted-looking public house at the rear of Islington, which appeared to offer the privacy requisite for their second meeting, and the conversation that might thereon ensue.
As Jerry had no particular desire, under present circumstances, to mingle with all such chance customers as might come in, he avoided the common drinking-room, and walked into a parlour, the air of which smelt like that of a well some time since fumigated with tobacco smoke, that required more than ordinary time finally to make its escape. The floor was spread with coarse sand, not unlike gravel in a state of childhood; while the window looked out upon a back-yard nearly as large as an ordinary closet, and in obscurity very strongly resembling a summer twilight.
As the old man seemed inclined to stop a while, a fat untidy girl, with her hair half out of her cap, and her countenance curiously smeared with ashes and black-lead, came in to light a fire already “built” in the grate.