Our Mutual Friend

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need

to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures

in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron,

and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled

hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty,

sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed,

pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in

his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He

had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no

cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty

boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was

too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a

lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he

looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide,

which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched

every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-

way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his

daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he

watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of

dread or horror.