They took three omnibuses to get to the Thames embankment. They could have taken two, but as they were leaving the house, Mary thought she saw—what? Perhaps nothing. Leaning against one of the houses in the row was a beggar, hunched over in a peculiar way. But then beggars often were hunched over, weren’t they? The man was probably a drunkard. There was nothing unusual about his appearance—beggars appeared even here, in the respectable streets around Regent’s Park.
