She went reluctantly, by bus, changing at the bottom ofPark Lane. For days she had not seen Jim; she did not want to see him now. Therefore, though go she must, she would not sit down; she would not lift her veil; she would be in and out of his house again as quickly as ever she could. She passed the Marble Arch, and at Lancaster Gate got down and walked. She reached Jim's vast and tomblike house.
At the word "Consolidation" the man who opened the door said: "This way, please," and led her along a low-lighted hall, round a staircase the outspread double wings of which resembled some huge alighting architectural bird, and along a narrower passage to the library. At the touch of a switch the room broke into a softly masked glow of light. "Please to sit down," said the servant; but Louie stood by the great writing-table, looking towards the door. Evie had taken stock of her dwelling; Louie looked only towards the door of Jim's library.
Then, as the door was opened, she pushed up her veil after all. Jim came in.
He placed a chair for her; she still refused to sit. She continued to stand even when it appeared that the papers she had brought would require some examination. As she stood, a bell, not unlike that of a muffled telephone, sounded for a moment and then ceased. It was followed by a tap on the door.
"Come in," said Jim, without looking up.
Evie Jeffries entered, dressed as if for a State ball.
Even had Louie not seen her face, the touch of her hand would have told her what had happened. Evie was back again exactly where she had been; the only difference was that she now hated Louie the more that she had abased herself before her. Many times on that other Saturday afternoonLouie had begged Evie to go; now she longed to fly herself. After another minute Jim put it into her power to do so. He rose and returned the signed papers.
"Thank you," he said, and added, turning to Evie, "I don't know whether Miss Causton's had supper?"
Evie's face lighted up as artificially as if there too a switch had turned up masked lights.
"Yes; won't you let me have them lay a tray for you, 'Miss' Causton? It won't be any trouble," she said.
"No, thank you," said Louie. "Please don't come to the door, Mr. Jeffries."
He came, however.
"Good-night," he said, as the door was held open for her to pass out.
"Good-night," said Louie.
She remembered afterwards that she noticed, out in Oxford Street again, a sandwichman bearing an illuminated board with the announcement of some concert or entertainment upon it. Pasted across the device was a strip of paper with the words "To night" upon it. The date was the sixteenth of May. At midday on the day following, Louie, coming out of Mr. Whitlock's room, saw Jim advancing as if to come in. He saw her, stared hard at her for a moment, paused irresolutely, and then turned abruptly and walked away again. She watched his back, shaped like a church-door, but bowed as if with a load too great for him, disappear in the direction of his own room. He had made no attempt to conceal the deliberate avoidance. She half expected, though she knew not why, that he would send for her presently. He did not. She was infinitely glad. Something, she was perfectly sure, had happened between him and his wife. It was the first timehe had not sought her aid. Had he, now that it was too late, told her? Had he realised that it was too late to tell her? Had he, realising this, determined to take his last risk and to tell her nevertheless? Or had something happened that had at last unsealed his eyes so that he now saw with a clearness as merciless as that of Louie herself?
Louie could not tell. She only saw his face again, the face of a man suddenly old as he realised his defeat, and his disappearing back, hunched under a burden that was crushing him at the last.
§b
"If I were you, Miss Causton, I should leave early to-night," said Mr. Whitlock that afternoon.
Louie looked up inquiringly from her desk.
"Oh, if youwantto make it a matter of conscience! But Mr. Jeffries is giving a party to-night, and both Sir Julius and I will be leaving early."
He nodded pleasantly as he dropped his hint, and left her. Louie resumed her work.
It was a report of phosphate deposits, but it had been worked over before and needed little attention; or at all events it got little. At five o'clock Louie gathered the sheets together and put them into the drawer of her table. As she did so some object at the back of the drawer knocked. She thrust in her hand. It was the forgotten bottle of chloroform.
"I'd better throw that down the basin," Louie muttered.
"I think, Mrs. Jeffries, that you and Roy between you put me a little beside myself for a day or two. Much better not to have things like that lying about; to have 'em's sometimes to use 'em. I'll throw it away now."
But as she was rising, one of the telephone girls brought her a cup of tea and a biscuit, and she closed the drawer again. The girl began to talk. She was Ivy Warner, the operator who would talk to her "boys" over the telephone if she wanted. Louie, as a matter of fact, always admired the skill with which she did this. A yard away not a word would be audible, and yet Miss Warner would be carrying on a flirtation in Brighton or Bournemouth under the eye of Mr. Stonor himself.
"Well, how's Harold?" said Louie, smiling over her cup of tea.
"Oh, not at all pleased with himself; backed three winners to-day, one at thirty to one, a gift; like to see him? He's coming up this evening," Miss Warner replied. "I'd a chin with him a quarter of an hour ago; dinner at seven-thirty, at the Troc; no steak-and-fried and a small dark lager when a thirty-to-one creeps home! He's bringing a friend, too; a dasher, Harold says; he's almost afraid to introduce him; and Daisy says she really must give her steady a show to-night. Know anybody?"
Louie thought for a moment. It was a thing she had never done before. She gave Ivy a sidelong look. Again she had the hunger to go somewhere, to see lights, hear music, smell the cigarettes of men.
"Do you care to take me?" she said.
Ivy was surprised. "You?"
"Oh, not if I should spoil sport——"
"Rather not! Do come! What a lark! I'll get on to Harold again now. You really mean it?"
"Yes."
"Good egg!" cried Ivy, glad to make up her party and to improve her relations with her business superior at thesame time. "I didn't really want Daisy, you see. Of course they do talk loud at the Troc, but Daisy's just atiny bit ... well, a perfect stranger had the cheek to come up to our table and speak to her the last time——"
Ivy ran jubilantly off to ring up Harold again.
Louie told herself it was a stupid thing to do; she was getting into the habit of loitering about late at night, heedless of Jimmy. But she had promised, and would go. If she didn't she would only be mopishly thinking, and, after all, she would be no more out of place with Harold's dashing friend than Evie Jeffries would be in another place much about the same time. Perhaps the dasher for Evie and Jim's guests for herself would have been more fitting, but no matter. She would be a dasher too. She wondered how Ivy was describing her dashing self to Harold over the telephone.
At seven o'clock she made herself ready and left the Consolidation with Ivy.
She retained no very clear recollection afterwards of the gaieties of that evening, but the little she did remember arrested her a little. She had a confused impression of the lights and tables and pilastered walls of the Trocadero as of a bright beckoning vista, stretching before her as the white road stretches before the knapsacked and stout-booted walker. She knew that many girls went that way.... The air was heavy with the smell of coffee, smoke, dishes, scent; Harold's friend was a Hebrew "killer," and reminded her of Miss Levey; noisily he claimed the privilege, which Harold noisily disputed, of paying for everything; and the waiter contemptuously accepted a tip of a sovereign from him. Perhaps he was the same cavalier who had resented Daisy's loudness; at all events he appeared to findin Louie's quietness another—or perhaps the same—meaning; and Louie had to move her chair and to change her attitude at the table. Afterwards they went to the Alhambra; it was Ivy who cried out at the sight of two cabs and refused to go unless they all went together. At the Alhambra Louie was afraid she was rather a wet blanket; she declined to "take a walk round" and remained seated in her stall; but Harold's friend was fickle as well as dashing, for by-and-by she had a glimpse of him with another lady, who had not dined with them at the Trocadero. She wondered how Evie Jeffries had got on—or "got off," to use an expression of Kitty Windus's.
Suddenly—perhaps it was this thought of Evie elsewhere that did it—she got up, sought the cloakroom, and walked out of the place. She went home, once more quietly and steadily thinking of that vista of lights and cigar smoke and laughing mouths and gilded pilasters—the way so many girls went.
The row she expected with Ivy in the morning was not a moment delayed. It began in the lift in which they both happened to ascend together.
"Good-morning," said Ivy stiffly. "I hope you got home in good time last night."
Louie waited until the liftman had clashed the doors to behind them; then, "I'd a headache," she said.
"Well, perhaps it's better than having one in the morning," said Ivy, more icily still. "All the same, there is such a thing as playing the game when you go out with people."
"I'm sorry. I oughtn't to have come," said Louie, walking with the angry girl to the telephone exchange, where the lights on the great switchboard came and wentlike the sparks at the back of a gate. They were coming and going with great rapidity that morning.
"Oh,muchobliged for your company, I'm sure," Ivy broke out, "but——"
"Sssh!" came from a girl who stretched the rubber worms.
"Sssh yourself, Daisy Dawson—time you knew how to speak into a phone by this time!" snapped Ivy.
But another and a louder "Sssh!" came from another girl, and suddenly Mr. Stonor's head appeared in the doorway.
"Quiet there!" he rapped out, and withdrew his head again.
"Sssh, Ivy—haven't you heard?" Daisy Dawson said softly.
Ivy's own voice dropped. "What?" she asked quickly.
"About Mr. Jeffries."
"No—what?"
Mr. Stonor came in again—but not before Louie had heard Daisy whisper the word "dead."
Suddenly she remembered the face of the liftman. She clutched Mr. Stonor's arm. He looked at her. There was no need to ask.
Dead!
Slowly she walked to her own table behind the screen.
The place was at once busier and more hushed than usual. Presently Mr. Whitlock passed. Mr. Whitlock was thirty-five; he looked fifty. Louie only asked him a single question: "Is it in the papers?" He nodded and passed on. She sought a messenger.
It was on the right-hand middle page. It had happened at one o'clock in the morning; cerebral hæmorrhage. Thatvery evening he had given a dinner-party; followed a short interview with Sir Peregrine Campbell, one of the guests; but Mr. Robson, of the Board of Trade, had declined to be seen. There would be no inquest. Heartfelt sympathy was extended to his widow. Half-a-column of "career" closed the announcement. The early edition of the evening paper for which she sent out had it all over again.
Dead!
Another absence!
Slowly she turned the paper and began at the beginning again.
Jim dead!
That night Louie fetched Jimmy from his cot into her own bed. It was not, she felt, for comfort for herself; she had a strange feeling that she ought to be comforting Jimmy. Jimmy slept, but, her eyes alternately very widely open and very tightly closed in the dark, she whispered to him.
"Well, we've got to look after ourselves now," she whispered to the sleeping child. "I don't think we care to go and see him, do we? I daresay she wouldn't refuse it, but we won't go. That was his wife, who said she'd a little boy like you, and of course we're all very sorry for her. She did give him all she had; she said she'd die for him; but of course that's only a way people have of speaking when they mean they love somebody very much. Nobody wants her to die for him really; that would only be two dead instead of one; and she won't actually die.... And she'd a sad thing happen once before. Nobody ever knew about that really except me and him; she didn't know; if she did she might die really then. People haveto be careful, they say, when they've once had a terrible shock. It's rather funny though, Jimmy, that mother shouldn't feel very much of a shock. Of course I didn't expect it, but as soon as it happened it seemed as if it had been bound to happen. That's queer—and I don't know that I wouldn't have preferred the shock."
She continued her curious consolation of the sleeping boy:
"Poor Jimmy—poor mother! He looked beaten yesterday—done—but I didn't think.... One never does think till afterwards.... Ah, but mother did, once, a long time ago! Mother danced with him once, and knew then—and the next time she saw him Jimmy was quite a big boy. If she could only have seen him a few times in between, she doesn't know what she could have done, but she would have done something, and then by-and-by he would have blessed her for it—she's sure, quite sure he would.... And there she was, with some terrible people at a music hall——"
She choked a little.
Even had it been proposed to her, she did not think she would have gone to see Jim. That was another woman's affair; Louie's part in him had nothing to do with what remained now. Not that she was so absurd as to tell herself she had lost nothing; even when it is only yours to look at, or perhaps to put your arms about just once, a body counts for something; but the other woman had had nothing but that. "Nothing but" was perhaps a queer way of putting it; for that "nothing but" Louie might perhaps have given all the rest; but all the same it was not very much her business now. Her business now, like the other woman's, was to jog on just the same, the one in herempty mansion, the other one it didn't much matter where. Again she whispered to Jimmy.
"How thankful I am that I didn't tell her—something! Oh, I don't think I could bear her to die for him as she said she would! And I do hope he's not been so foolish as to—leave anything about; anything that might tell her, I mean; she can't bear what I can bear. But he wouldn't. He wouldn't cover it all up so cleverly to go and uncover it himself. I always knew it would happen if that insect got in his way; Jim wouldn't think twice about it, except how to make himself safe.... Was it Kitty Windus who told me that about him—about his father having been an English merchant captain and his mother a Corsican woman he found dancing in a sailors' café in Marseilles? If it wasn't Kitty I dreamed it; mother's done a most foolish lot of dreaming; but it must have been Kitty. They say they do that kind of thing in Corsica. I shall never know.... Well, it doesn't matter.... Poor little Jimmy...."
She deliberately tried herself, to see whether she was capable of emotion about him. She seemed to be quite incapable. "I'm simply callous," she thought.... She tried several days later, on the day of his funeral; the words she repeated to herself had no meaning for her; "gone," was merely a thing of four letters, "never" one of five. The word "absence" she quite failed to understand. She heard that Mrs. Jeffries was prostrated, but quite as well as could be expected in the circumstances. Perhaps Mrs. Jeffries too was repeating the words "gone" and "never." Louie wondered whether she would marry again. It would not surprise her.
Well, if Evie Jeffries could live, Louie could live.
A piece of news, however, which she had from Billy Izzard one night—this was three weeks later, but her stony insensibility had not changed—filled her, she could not have told why, with a quite different disquietude. It appeared that Billy had felt himself permitted to call on Mrs. Jeffries, and had found her (so he told Louie) busy with her husband's private papers. Sir Julius also had been there, to advise if advice was necessary; and Sir Julius had been of opinion that the painful task would be more quickly over if Mrs. Jeffries would have a number of papers that were written in shorthand transcribed by a clerk, if a trustworthy one could be found. "In fact, he mentioned your name," said Billy. But it appeared that Mrs. Jeffries knew some shorthand, had other reasons, and so forth. She had refused to have the papers transcribed. Naturally they had not said much with Billy there, who, indeed, had not stayed many minutes; but he had gathered that the papers formed some sort of a journal.
Louie felt her flesh grow queerly crisp. This, by the way, was in a little restaurant not far from the Palace Theatre. Louie had had three consecutive nights at home, and felt that a fourth would kill her. She and Billy were going to the Palace afterwards.
"A journal?" she said slowly.
"Well, Pepper rather thought a novel of some sort; I'd a talk with him afterwards; but I suppose he only knows what Mrs. Jeffries tells him. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that poor old Jeff dabbled a bit in that sort of thing. I'm quite sure he'd have made a painter. One of the big sort he was, the Titian, Leonardo, Cellini sort—the big men, who can take an art or so in their stride."
"What made Sir Julius think it might be a novel?" Louie hoped that her new agitation did not show.
"My dear girl, you know as much about it as I do."
"And it was in shorthand?" she demanded.
"Yes."
"His own?"
"I'm sure I can't say. It was in his desk though. Why?"
"And you say Mrs. Jeffries is reading it herself?"
"Well, when Pepper suggested you—and a Miss Levey, I remember, whoever she is——"
"Miriam Levey? Yes?" Louie said, with a jerk.
Billy looked hard at her. "What's the matter?" he said abruptly. "You're as queer as Mrs. Jeffries herself was about it."
"She was queer? How, queer?"
"Oh, I don't know. How can one describe things like that—just impressions one gets?"
"Did she strike you as queer because she'd perhaps read some of it?"
"Well, I understand it was private——"
"You mean shemusthave read some of it to find that out?"
"I suppose so."
Again Louie had that curious crawling of her flesh. She hesitated for a moment; then, slowly:
"What sort of terms are you on with Mrs. Jeffries, Billy?"
Billy stared. "Oh, quite all right—I don't understand——"
"Have you any influence over her?"
"What sort of influence?"
Louie hesitated again. After all, it might be only a fear. She went on. "Say influence enough to advise her about reading that journal, or novel, or whatever it is?"
"Lord, no!" said Billy. "I was his friend, hardly hers, you see."
"Well, if it could be put as a matter of friendship with him?" Louie was speaking almost feverishly now.
"I wish I knew exactly what you meant," said Billy.
"Order me another cup of coffee. That's what I can't tell you, because I don't know myself. But let me ask another question. Do you happen to know whether there are any real names in this thing, whatever it is?"
"Really, I——"
"Just a moment. I'll tell you why I asked. If this is a journal, and has names of people in it, the chances are mine's there."
Billy was quick enough. He nodded. "I see; at least I think I see. You mean about his coming in that night and Mrs. Jeffries possibly not liking it? Well, to tell the truth I don't think she did much. I could have bitten my tongue out when I'd told her; but I suppose everybody doesn't look on these things quite as we do. You mean in a word—excuse me for putting it rather stupidly—that she's jealous and thinks she can find out the truth? Supposing there was any 'truth' to find out, I mean?"
"That's the idea. Of course there was no 'truth.'"
"Well? Why not let her discover that and make her happy, poor thing? You see, he was her husband."
Louie winced, but continued. "That's all right as far as it goes; but if there's one name there are probably others."
Billy looked sharply at her. "Other women? Jeffries? Don't you believe it!"
"I didn't say women."
"What then?"
"I can't tell you. And perhaps I'm altogether wrong. But if I'm not wrong, Billy," she said earnestly, "and you've any interest in Mrs. Jeffries at all—say interest enough to want to spare her a shock—she oughtn't to be allowed to read that journal—always supposing it is a journal."
Billy gave a short laugh. "Really, Louie! Is this the Surrey or Sadlers Wells?... You're not serious, are you? Of course it's bound to be painful for her at the best, but she's getting on very well—better than we could have hoped."
Louie made a little despairing gesture. "Well, I can't tell you any more."
"Well, if it's as important as all that, why don'tyoutell her?"
"I couldn't do that either. Look here, Billy, couldn't you find out about this for me?"
"Oh, dash it all—how can I?"
The saucer of Louie's coffee cup was full of ashes; she added another butt and reached for Billy's case. She looked Billy full in the eyes as he struck a match for her.
"Do you go much to Iddlesleigh Gate?"
"Well, just at present, you see——"
"I mean,couldyou go? Where does all this take place? In that library? (Yes, I've been once.)"
"Yes. At least that's where we were that night."
Still Louie looked steadily into his eyes. "Now this reallyisSurrey and Sadlers Wells," she said. "Couldyou get those papers out of her way—anyhow—so that she doesn't read them?"
Billy twinkled a little. "It takes a woman to do these things, Louie."
"Suppose without asking any questions, if you did I'd—marry Roy?" After all, to marry Roy would be no worse than anything else now.
The twinkle disappeared. Billy was grave again.
"I'd like you to marry Roy, Louie."
"Well ... is it a bet?"
But Billy only shook his head. This was all very well at the Surrey and Sadlers Wells, but——
"It's a physical impossibility," he said. "And if it wasn't, I wouldn't."
"That's final?" said Louie, looking into his eyes for the last time.
"My dear girl——"
Louie rose. "All right. Then we may as well get across to the Palace and see Marie Lloyd."
Could she have said more? She did not see that she could. The chance loomed tremendously large now that Jimhadbeen fool enough to write things after all, and perhaps his wife was reading that journal, if it was a journal, even then——
Louie could not stop her—no power on earth could stop her. What Jim had evidently not told her during his life she would read for herself now that he had gone.
He would have done better to tell her.
But there: perhaps it was not a journal——
"Er—Miss Causton," Sir Julius called—"can you stay for an hour or so? No, a private affair; I hope it's not inconvenient; thanks."
He was sickly white and tired-looking; Louie's feet dragged, and her brain was as stupid as clay. She was sorry for Sir Julius;hehad had no preparation; as for Louie, it seemed to her now that she had been passing from preparation to preparation for such things for the whole of her life. This of the morning paper was only the latest of her fulfilments. The prophets, she thought dully, must have been very weary men.... But on second thoughts perhaps Sir Julius ought to have been sorry forher. Even shock is better than foreknowledge.
For of course Sir Julius wanted her to stay in connection with this of Mrs. Jeffries.
She had put on her hat and coat for departure; as if she walked in her sleep, she passed out of Sir Julius's room and removed them again. She bathed her face, but felt little fresher; then she returned.
It was about Mrs. Jeffries. It was about them both. Then Louie seemed to remember that Sir Julius had said something about an article on his deceased colleague for a Review. She supposed that was why he wanted her to take down his words in shorthand. Unless it was for the inquest. Gas-taps turned on, doors and windows sealed, and so forth usually meant an inquest; and they wouldnot have far to look for her motive—suicide through natural grief. It was only that morning, but it seemed an old, old story already.
"'Tragic Death of a Lady,'" Sir Julius read out from a newspaper....
Well, he wouldn't want that part taken down; indeed, if he had only known what Louie knew, he would not have asked her to take anything down at all. But her notebook was on her knee and her pencil sharpened, and when Sir Julius had finished reading her hand began to write, purely functionally, of itself. It was no trouble to Louie whatever; nay, her hand was hardly called upon more than her mind; the pencil itself did it. After all, foreseeing minds could be put to better uses than the mere recording of things after the event.... "Sad business, sad business," Sir Julius was saying; and "Sad business, sad business," the obedient pencil wrote. But Louie wondered whether it was so sad after all. Evie Jeffries had had a sort of foreknowledge too; "I could die for him; you couldn't do more," Louie remembered she had once said; yet it was doubtful whether she had died for love of him after all. Call it gas-taps, or the shock of discovering that Jim had been her lover's executioner....
Still, she had died, from whatever reason, and she had been quite right in saying that Louie could have done no more.
It was strange the way the pencil wrote of itself. "A page of notes in her husband's shorthand has been found under one of the pillars of the writing-table," it wrote, and it omitted, as if it had been endowed with Louie's own intelligence, Sir Julius's interpolated remark, "I've got that page of notes, by the way." Mr. Whitlock had describedto Louie one day a contrivance called a tele-writer; a pen dipped itself into a bottle of ink and wrote, unassisted, a telegraphed message; they were new, and they hadn't got them at the Consolidation yet; but they were putting them into some of the post offices, Mr. Whitlock had said. Her pencil moved like the pen of a tele-writer. She watched it, fascinated. It was writing as Sir Julius talked, about Jim now.
"—lived an intense crowded life too. I should say at a guess there weren't many things he hadn't done at one time and another, short of a murder or a matrimonial infidelity. Don't think he could have been tempted to do that. One woman could do anything she liked with him, but the others wouldn't have much chance——"
Very little chance, Louie thought. That, in a sense, had been the tragedy of it all. Louie knew more about that than Sir Julius; Louie had once said, "Come, come!" to him, in tones that might have brought angels from above and devils from below running for love, but it had not made a ha'p'orth of difference to Jim. Sir Julius seemed to be praising him for it; Louie was not sure that she could exactly do that; she could almost as soon have mocked him for it; but you neither mock nor praise a blind man merely because he is blind. It was funny that Sir Julius, with not very much to boast about himself, should set up an idol of faithfulness; and not just for somebody else to worship either; that was the funny part; men did that kind of thing; sinned, and yet worshipped, and called it "the maintenance of an ideal." They honoured Joseph, and winked when his back was turned. Perhaps they made much of him because of his rarity. Well, it was all the same to Potiphar's wife....
But all at once something seemed to have happened to the pencil. It was tele-writing very furiously. Sir Julius was reading from another piece of paper; Louie fancied, somehow, that it might be the piece that had got wafted under the pillar of Jim's desk.
"—show him that red thing on the floor and that curved thing on the door."But now Archie in his turn seemed to have become divided. He had turned suddenly white. But an habitual pertness still persisted in his tongue. I don't think this had any relation whatever to the physical peril he seemed at last to have realised he was in. I stood over him huge and black as Fate.... "Spare him if you can," that generous bloodthirsty devil in me muttered quickly...."Merridew," I said heavily, "you'll disappear to-morrow morning—or——""Shall I?" he bragged falteringly....
"—show him that red thing on the floor and that curved thing on the door."
But now Archie in his turn seemed to have become divided. He had turned suddenly white. But an habitual pertness still persisted in his tongue. I don't think this had any relation whatever to the physical peril he seemed at last to have realised he was in. I stood over him huge and black as Fate.... "Spare him if you can," that generous bloodthirsty devil in me muttered quickly....
"Merridew," I said heavily, "you'll disappear to-morrow morning—or——"
"Shall I?" he bragged falteringly....
He seemed to have hanged him, then; "that curved thing on the door" evidently meant a hook. That was rather revolting; these were the things about murder that Louie had not wanted to know.
"Sort of grim tale he would write," said Sir Julius to the pencil; "and of course—de mortuisand so on—but he did marry the wrong woman. I suppose they're together again now."
Suddenly Louie put down her notebook and pencil. Her voice, too, as she spoke, seemed to her a sort of tele-voice.
"Will you excuse me just a moment?" she said. "I'm thirsty."
She went out. When she returned, three or four minutes later, Sir Julius sniffed once or twice and asked her if she had a toothache. She took up the pencil and notebook again. Sir Julius resumed.
"What was I saying? Oh yes, about his marrying the wrong woman.... But he was a mass of contradictions, and one of 'em was that he merely idealised her. Pretty, of course, but poor Jeffries could have done better for himself than that. She never could bear me...."
Louie felt no difference yet; she did not know how long these things took. For a moment she wondered what would happen after ... and then it struck her as foolish to wonder about a thing she would know so soon. She fastened her eyes on the pencil again. It went on writing, and Louie was thinking of her loved little Jimmy now.... She could not have done very much for him; he might even have grown up to bear her some sort of a grudge; Roy would adopt him; he would be far, far better with Roy. There was a pony out at grass for him now; he would ride and shoot and fish, and his father would send him into the army; and perhaps there was already a baby girl somewhere in the world who would one day be his wife—the right wife. "Was die Mutter träumt, das vollbringt der Sohn...."
It was far, far better....
"Well," the pencil wrote, "there's nothing to be said now, poor creatures.... Funny smell in here, Miss Causton; I'll smoke if you don't mind."
Sir Julius lighted a cigar. Its penetrating odour mingled with that of the sweet, releasing stuff.
Ah! It was coming! The pencil wrote no less quickly, but it looked a little smaller and farther away.
"But sometimes it made me almost angry that he hadn't married the woman he ought...."
Louie felt her head sinking.... Yes, the woman he ought....
That had been the real fatality....
Her lids dropped for a moment, and then heavily lifted again; but she could still see the pencil—mistily—dreamily—as if endued with a life not her own—flying on.
THE END