Her Faithful Knight — page 255: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Aylmer to the Rescue. 251 gray-eyed, and until very recently resident in the Hammer- smith district of London.” - The news had so shocked and startled him that he had not been home that night. At about four a. m. he had left his office for a journalists’ club, where he had singled out especially one reporter and held a prolonged conference with him. Between five and ten in the morning he had learned all that other pressmen could tell him about the case in question, and had snatched a troubled sleep of two hours at the Wigwam Club. Bow street was his next re- sort, after he had hurriedly scanned the columns of the morning papers. Then, after a hurried, pefunctory break- fast, he had betaken himself to 4 Lockhart Cottages, which he now, for the first time, knew as the home of Phyllis Knight. The house was empty. Such a mean, sordid little home he found it, hemmed in by the bare, high walls of the Board School buildings, hidden from the Hammersmith road by unsightly boardings, in an atmosphere of dirt and dust, shouting and screaming children and loudly gos- sipping charwomen and laundresses. Clearly something was known or guessed in the neigh- borhood concerning the mystery which overhung No. 4, and Aylmer had little difficulty in engaging in conversa- tion a voluble lady with rolled-up sleeves and red elbows, who freely confided to him her opinion as to the late dwellers in the cottage. “Them two Knights was real ladies, there wasn’t any doubt o’ that. They kep’ themselves to themselves, but I’m not one to blame them for that. The person I couldn’t abide was that there old parrot-faced servant. You take my word for it, sir, if something mysterious-like comes out about that there ’ouse, Mrs. Cresswell’s at the bottom of it. It ain’t no good trying to persuade me as some- thing isn’t up. Pleecemen in plain clothes and _Pleece- (e(0) boo S (<() =D im