“Hi, you Johnnies! You don’t often see a show like this! Here’s a poor devil whose mistress has just been telling him a pretty little story of her husband; walk up, walk up! He’s taken the knock, you see.”

In fancy he saw them gaping round the tortured lover; and grinned as he thought of some respectable, newly-married spectre enabled by the state of his own affections to catch an inkling of what was going on within Bosinney; he fancied he could see his mouth getting wider and wider, and the fog going down and down. For in George was all that contempt of the middle class⁠—especially of the married middle class⁠—peculiar to the wild and sportsmanlike spirits in its ranks.

But he began to be bored. Waiting was not what he had bargained for.

“After all,” he thought, “the poor chap will get over it; not the first time such a thing has happened in this little city!” But now his quarry again began muttering words of violent hate and anger. And following a sudden impulse George touched him on the shoulder.

Bosinney spun round.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

George could have stood it well enough in the light of the gas lamps, in the light of that everyday world of which he was so hardy a connoisseur; but in this fog, where all was gloomy and unreal, where nothing had that matter-of-fact value associated by Forsytes with earth, he was a victim to strange qualms, and as he tried to stare back into the eyes of this maniac, he thought:

“If I see a bobby, I’ll hand him over; he’s not fit to be at large.”

But waiting for no answer, Bosinney strode off into the fog, and George followed, keeping perhaps a little further off, yet more than ever set on tracking him down.

“He can’t go on long like this,” he thought. “It’s God’s own miracle he’s not been run over already.” He brooded no more on policemen, a sportsman’s sacred fire alive again within him.