drew from beneath the ramshackle bed (where there was a great store of it) a large sheet of dirty and thick paper, and one of many lengths of string that there lay rolled.
He made a bundle of the Green Overcoat, hurriedly, misshapenly. He drew on a pair of trousers, covered his upper body with a great ulster, most unsuitable to the season, groped for a round hat that had done ten years' service; pulled on his thin, pointed, elastic-sided boots, and shuffled out into the sun carrying his parcel under his arm. He was not free from Hell until he was free of it. But it would fetch twenty pounds!
As the old man shuffled down the street eyes watched him from window after window. He was to the broken poor of Ormeston what certain financial houses are to The Masters of Europe. They feared, they hated, they obeyed him; and while he shuffled on few men whom he met would fail, if he met them alone, to do his bidding.
Mr. Montague's God sent him a man standing alone, or rather lounging alone, a man reclining against the corner wall of a house called, I regret to say, "The Pork Pie," and already doomed in the eyes of the unflinching magistrates of Ormeston: doomed at a
