The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed
out into the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting
radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my
mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of
faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light -- sad faces
and glad, haggard and merry. Like all humankind, they flitted
from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once
more. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy
evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged,
combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from
Miss Morstan's manner that she was suffering from the same
feeling. Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences. He
held his open notebook upon his knee, and from time to time he
jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of his pocket-
lantern.
At the Lyceum Theatre the crowds were already thick at the
side-entrances. In front a continuous stream of hansoms and
four-wheelers were rattling up, discharging their cargoes of shirt-
fronted men and beshawled, bediamonded women. We had hardly
reached the third pillar, which was our rendezvous, before a
small, dark, brisk man in the dress of a coachman accosted us.
"Are you the parties who come with Miss Morstan?" he
asked.
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