"'Well,' he says, 'what of it? There's plenty more where he comes from.'

"I tried reasoning with him from time to time, but he wasn't a sort of
boy to be moved from a purpose. His mother was the only argument that
had any weight with him. I believe so long as she had lived he would
have kept straight; that was the only soft spot in him. But
unfortunately she died a couple of years later, and then I lost sight of
Joe altogether. I made enquiries, but no one could tell me anything. He
had just disappeared, that's all.

"One afternoon, four years later, I was sitting in the coffee-room of a
City restaurant where I was working, reading the account of a clever
robbery committed the day before. The thief, described as a well-dressed
young man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing a short black beard and
moustache, had walked into a branch of the London and Westminster Bank
during the dinner-hour, when only the manager and one clerk were there.
He had gone straight through to the manager's room at the back of the
bank, taken the key from the inside of the door, and before the man could
get round his desk had locked him in. The clerk, with a knife to his
throat, had then been persuaded to empty all the loose cash in the bank,
amounting in gold and notes to nearly five hundred pounds, into a bag
which the thief had thoughtfully brought with him. After which, both of
them--for the thief seems to have been of a sociable disposition--got
into a cab which was waiting outside, and drove away. They drove
straight to the City: the clerk, with a knife pricking the back of his
neck all the time, finding it, no doubt, a tiresome ride. In the middle
of Threadneedle Street, the gentlemanly young man suddenly stopped the
cab and got out, leaving the clerk to pay the cabman.

"Somehow or other, the story brought back Joseph to my mind. I seemed to