Blake.
My room, as I took pains to have it, overlooked the avenue, and from
its windows I could easily watch the goings and comings of the
gentleman whose movements were daily becoming of more and more
interest to me. For set it down to caprice--and men are often as
capricious as women--or account for it as you will, his restlessness
at this period was truly remarkable. Not a day that he did not spend
his time in walking the streets, and that not in his usual aimless
gentlemanly fashion, but eagerly and with an intent gaze that roamed
here and there, like a bird seeking its prey. It would often be as
late as five o'clock before he came in, and if, as now frequently
happened, he did not have company to dinner, he was even known to
start out again after seven o'clock and go over the same ground as in
the morning, looking with strained gaze, that vainly endeavored to
appear unconcerned, into the faces of the women that he passed. I not
unfrequently followed him at these times as much for my own amusement
as from any hope I had of coming upon anything that should aid me in
the work before me. But when he suddenly changed his route of travel
from a promenade in the fashionable thoroughfares of Broadway and
Fourteenth Street to a walk through Chatham Square and the dark,
narrow streets of the East side, I began to scent whom the prey might
be that he was seeking, and putting every other consideration aside,
regularly set myself to dog his steps, as only I, with my innumerable
disguises, knew how to do.
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