suggested just now that I did not want to come and bother you for information without any return. If I can be of any assistance to you in that matter,” he added, glancing towards the envelope, “I shall be very pleased.”
She sighed gratefully.
“Just till Victor’s people return to town,” she said. “I know that they mean to do something for me.”
“How much?” he asked.
“Two hundred pounds would keep me going,” she told him.
He wrote out a cheque. Miss Hyslop drew a sigh of relief as she laid it on one side with the envelope. Then she swung round in her chair to face him where he sat at the writing-table.
“I am afraid you will think that what I have to tell is very insignificant,” she confessed. “Victor was one of those boys who always fancied themselves bored. He was bored with polo, bored with motoring, bored with the country and bored with town. Then quite suddenly during the last few weeks he seemed changed. All that he would tell me was that he had found a new interest in life. I don’t know what it was but I don’t think it was a nice one. He seemed to drop all his old friends, too, and go about with a new set altogether—not a nice set at all. He used to stay out all night, and he quite gave up going to dances and places where he could take me. Once or twice he came here in the afternoon, dead beat, without having been to bed at all, and before he could say half-a-dozen words he was asleep in my easy-chair. He used to mutter such horrible things that I had to wake him up.”
“Was he ever short of money?” Francis asked.
She shook her head.
“Not seriously,” she answered. “He was quite well-off, besides what his people allowed him. I was going to have a wonderful settlement as soon as our engagement was announced. However, to go on with what I was telling you, the very night before—it happened—he came in to see me, looking like nothing on earth. He cried like a baby, behaved like a lunatic, and called himself all manner of names. He had had a great deal too much to drink, and I gathered that he had seen something horrible. It was then he asked me to dine with him the next night, and told me that he was going to break altogether with his new friends. Something in connection with them seemed to have given him a terrible fright.”
Francis nodded. He had the tact to abandon his curiosity at this precise point.
“The old story,” he declared, “bad company and rotten habits. I suppose some one got to know that the young man usually carried a great deal of money about with him.”
“It was so foolish of him,” she assented eagerly: “I warned him about it so often. The police won’t listen to it but I am absolutely certain that he was robbed. I noticed when he paid the bill that he had a great wad of bank-notes which were never discovered afterwards.”
Francis rose to his feet.
“What are you doing to-night?” he enquired.
“Nothing,” she acknowledged eagerly.
“Then let’s dine somewhere and see the show at the Frivolity,” he suggested.
“You dear man!” she assented with enthusiasm. “The one thing I wanted to do, and the one person I wanted to do it with.”
CHAPTER XII
It was after leaving Miss Daisy Hyslop’s flat that the event to which Francis Ledsam had been looking forward more than anything else in the world, happened. It came about entirely by chance. There were no taxis in the Strand. Francis himself had finished work for the day, and feeling disinclined for his usual rubber of bridge, he strolled homewards along the Mall. At the corner of Green Park, he came face to face with the woman who for the last few months had scarcely been out of his thoughts. Even in that first moment he realised to his pain that she would have avoided him if she could. They met, however, where the path narrowed, and he left her no chance to avoid him. That curious impulse of conventionality which opens a conversation always with cut and dried banalities, saved them perhaps from a certain amount of embarrassment. Without any conscious suggestion, they found themselves walking side by side.
“I have been wanting to see you very much indeed,” he said. “I even went so far as to wonder whether I dared call.”
“Why should you?” she asked. “Our acquaintance began and ended in tragedy. There is scarcely any purpose in carrying it further.”
He looked at her for a moment before replying. She was wearing black, but scarcely the black of a woman who sorrows. She was still frigidly beautiful, redolent, in all the details of her toilette, of that almost negative perfection which he had learnt to expect from her. She suggested to him still that same sense of aloofness from the actualities of life.
“I prefer not to believe that it is ended,” he protested. “Have you so many friends that you have no room for one who has never consciously done you any harm?”
She looked at him with some faint curiosity in her immobile features.
“Harm? No! On the contrary, I suppose I ought to thank you for your evidence at the inquest.”
“Some part of it was the truth,” he replied.
“I suppose so,” she admitted drily. “You told it very cleverly.”
He looked her in the eyes.
“My profession helped me to be a good witness,” he said. “As for the gist of my evidence, that was between my conscience and myself.”
“Your conscience?” she repeated. “Are there really men who possess such things?”
“I hope you will discover that for yourself some day,” he answered. “Tell me your plans? Where are you living?”
“For the present with my father in Curzon Street.”
“With Sir Timothy Brast?”
She assented.
“You know him?” she asked indifferently.
“Very slightly,” Francis replied. “We talked together, some nights ago, at Soto’s Restaurant. I am afraid that I did not make a very favourable impression upon him. I gathered, too, that he has somewhat eccentric tastes.”
“I do not see a great deal of my father,” she said. “We met, a few months ago, for the first time since my marriage, and things have been a little difficult between us—just at first. He really scarcely ever puts in an appearance at Curzon Street. I dare say you have heard that he makes a hobby of an amazing country house which he has down the river.”
“The Walled House?” he ventured.
She nodded.
“I see you have heard of it. All London, they tell me, gossips about the entertainments there.”
“Are they really so wonderful?” he asked.
“I have never been to one,” she replied. “As a matter of fact, I have spent scarcely any time in England since my marriage. My husband, as I remember he told you, was fond of travelling.”
Notwithstanding the warm spring air he was conscious of a certain chilliness. Her level, indifferent tone seemed to him almost abnormally callous. A horrible realisation flashed for a moment in his brain. She was speaking of the man whom she had killed!
“Your father overheard a remark of mine,” Francis told her. “I was at Soto’s with a friend—Andrew Wilmore, the novelist—and to tell you the truth we were speaking of the shock I experienced when I realised that I had been devoting every effort of which I was capable, to saving the life of—shall we say a criminal? Your father heard me say, in rather a flamboyant manner, perhaps, that in future I declared war against all crime and all criminals.”