While watching that house he had been watched
himself.
Then, again, the insane episode of the eating-house--the wild
hastening of his program, the untimely change of appearance in that
thronged room--and his rudeness to the woman behind the counter. With
anguish he remembered, or fancied he remembered, that she had looked
at him resentfully seeming to say as she studied his face. "I'm sizing
you up. Yes, I won't forget you--you brute."
His bag too--left by him at Waterloo for a solid proof that he was
_not_ in London as he pretended. The bag was at the cloak-room all
right when he came to fetch it, but perhaps in the meantime it had
been to Scotland Yard and back again. Besides, Waterloo was a station
he should never once have showed his nose in; the link between
Waterloo and home was too close--his own line--the railway whose staff
was replenished by people from his own part of the country. While he
was feeling glad that the passengers were strangers, perhaps a porter
was saying to a mate: "There goes the postmaster of Rodchurch. He and
I were boys together. I should know him anywhere, though it's ten
years since I last saw William Dale." He ought to have used Paddington
Station--he could have got to Salisbury that way, and gone into the
woods the way he came out of them.
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