E. Nesbit

“ Edmund Templar felt small, and rather dirty. He felt that he was not the sort of man he should care to be asked to meet. A meaner man might have felt all this, and have been sorry to feel it. Templar was, on the whole, not sorry. ”

“ He, too, was of The People, and Moses Mosenthal had his race’s instinct as to the man who can be trusted.
Templar, on the pavement of Oxford Street, told himself what a callow innocent he had been to be taken in by such an obvious trick. Of course the man had just dodged into that door—with some old latch-key that happened to fit—no doubt he’d played that game before—waited till the watchful taxi-cab had slithered away, and then limped home to his lodgings. But how had the women got out of the car? ”

“ He could not believe, now that he came to think of it, that it was impossible to trace two women in a motor-car in London. So he chartered a taxi-cab, with a driver whose manners and speech were at least as good as his own. (Are half the drivers of London taxi-cabs young men from the universities? The question justifies itself on three-fifths of the occasions on which one rides in the public motors. Or perhaps it is the County Council Schools?) He explained what he wanted at quite needless length, and the chauffeur of the taxi-cab understood at least twice as much as there was to understand. ”

“ Templar chose the Anchor, because he felt that there, sooner or later, he would see, in a boat, the beautiful face and fine hands of Pan. When people take old houses near rivers, it is safe to assume that they do it because they love boating. ”

“ Kipling so justly puts it, “all that ever went with evening dress”; and so far he had enjoyed nothing but the sight of her dancing, had been interested in nothing but his flat-footed attempts to play the detective, to find out what she desired to conceal.
He stopped this last thought: he did not want it. He unfolded his Pall Mall and began to read—first the Notes, then other things, till he pulled himself up in the middle of an article on markets, the final impression left on his mind being that wheat was “firm,” oil “low,” and that pork had “opened languid and declining.” ”

“ She goes for her week off next Saturday.”
“You seem to know a great deal about her,” said Templar weakly.
“I’ve seen her dance. And I’ve driven her three times, when she first came to London—once was to Charing Cross,” said the chauffeur. “If I wasn’t a poor devil that hasn’t a chance left, I wouldn’t give you the chance I’m giving you now.”
“You’ve been drinking,” said Templar.
“Of course I have,” said the chauffeur contemptuously. “What else do you expect? But I can drive straight all the same. ”

“ All that he had done was so silly—so amateurish, so unworthy of a thoroughly seasoned railway engineer and man of the world. Also, it was rather caddish—what? To be trying to hunt down a girl who didn’t want to be hunted. ”