While Crewe was busy with his magnifying glass Stork returned with the
boy who had accompanied Crewe on his visit to Riversbrook on the
previous day.

The boy, a thin white-faced, sharp-eyed London street urchin, seemed
curiously out of place in the handsomely furnished office, with his legs
tucked up under the carved rail of a fine old oak chair, and his big
dark eyes fixed intently on Crewe's face. The tie between him and the
detective was an unusual one. It dated back some twelve months, when
Crewe, in the investigation of a peculiarly baffling crime, found it
advisable to disguise himself and live temporarily in a crowded criminal
quarter of Islington. The rooms he took were above a secondhand clothing
shop kept by a drunken female named Leaver; a supposed widow who lived
at the back of the shop with her two children, Lizzie, a bold-eyed girl
of 17, who worked at a Clerkenwell clothing factory, and Joe, a typical
Cockney boy of fourteen, who sold papers in the streets during the day
and was fast qualifying for a thief at night when Crewe went to the
place to live.

Crewe soon discovered, through overhearing a loud quarrel between his
landlady and her daughter, that Mrs. Leaver's husband was alive, though
dead to his wife for all practical purposes, inasmuch as he was serving a
life's imprisonment for manslaughter. A fortnight after he had taken up
his temporary quarters above the shop the woman was removed to the
hospital suffering from the effects of a hard drinking bout, and died
there. The girl disappeared, and the boy would have been turned out on
the streets but for Crewe, who had taken a liking to him. Joe was
self-reliant, alert, and precocious, like most London street boys, but in
addition to these qualities he had a vein of imagination unusual in a lad
of his upbringing and environment. He devoured the exciting feuilleton