"Hallo!... Who's that?" he called sharply from his bed.

He had no answer.

He called again. "Hallo!... Who's there?... Who is it?"

This time he was sure he heard noises, soft and heavy, in the kitchen.

"This is a queer thing altogether," he muttered. "By Jove, I'm as weak as a kitten too.... Hallo, there! Somebody called, didn't they?... Elsie! Is that you?..."

Then he began to knock with his hand on the wall at the side of his bed.

"Elsie!... Elsie!... You called, didn't you?... Please come here, whoever it is!..."

There was a sound as of a closing door, and then silence. Oleron began to get rather alarmed.

"It may be a nurse," he muttered; "Elsie'd have to get me a nurse, of course. She'd sit with me as long as she could spare the time, brave la.s.s, and she'd get a nurse for the rest.... But it was awfully like her voice.... Elsie, or whoever it is!... I can't make this out at all. I must go and see what's the matter...."

He put one leg out of bed. Feeling its feebleness, he reached with his hand for the additional support of the wall....

But before putting out the other leg he stopped and considered, picking at his new-found beard. He was suddenly wondering whether he _dared_ go into the kitchen. It was such a frightfully long way; no man knew what horror might not leap and huddle on his shoulders if he went so far; when a man has an overmastering impulse to get back into bed he ought to take heed of the warning and obey it. Besides, why should he go? What was there to go for? If it was that Bengough creature again, let her look after herself; Oleron was not going to have things cramp themselves on his defenceless back for the sake of such a spoilsport as _she_!... If she was in, let her let herself out again, and the sooner the better for her! Oleron simply couldn't be bothered. He had his work to do. On the morrow, he must set about the writing of a novel with a heroine so winsome, capricious, adorable, jealous, wicked, beautiful, inflaming, and altogether evil, that men should stand amazed. She was coming over him now; he knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was near him; and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning....

He let go the wall and fell back into bed again as--oh, unthinkable!--the other half of that kiss that a gnash had interrupted was placed (how else convey it?) on his lips, robbing him of very breath....

XII

In the bright June sunlight a crowd filled the square, and looked up at the windows of the old house with the antique insurance marks in its walls of red brick and the agents' notice-boards hanging like wooden choppers over the paling. Two constables stood at the broken gate of the narrow entrance-alley, keeping folk back. The women kept to the outskirts of the throng, moving now and then as if to see the drawn red blinds of the old house from a new angle, and talking in whispers. The children were in the houses, behind closed doors.

A long-nosed man had a little group about him, and he was telling some story over and over again; and another man, little and fat and wide-eyed, sought to capture the long-nosed man's audience with some relation in which a key figured.

"... and it was revealed to me that there'd been something that very afternoon," the long-nosed man was saying. "I was standing there, where Constable Saunders is--or rather, I was pa.s.sing about my business, when they came out. There was no deceiving me, oh, no deceiving _me! I_ saw her face...."

"What was it like, Mr. Barrett?" a man asked.

"It was like hers whom our Lord said to, 'Woman, doth any man accuse thee?'--white as paper, and no mistake! Don't tell _me_!... And so I walks straight across to Mrs. Barrett, and 'Jane,' I says, 'this must stop, and stop at once; we are commanded to avoid evil,' I says, 'and it must come to an end now; let him get help elsewhere.'

"And she says to me, 'John,' she says, 'it's four-and-sixpence a week'--them was her words.

"'Jane,' I says, 'if it was forty-six thousand pounds it should stop'... and from that day to this she hasn't set foot inside that gate."

There was a short silence: then,

"Did Mrs. Barrett ever..._ see_ anythink, like?" somebody vaguely inquired.

Barrett turned austerely on the speaker.

"What Mrs. Barrett saw and Mrs. Barrett didn't see shall not pa.s.s these lips; even as it is written, keep thy tongue from speaking evil," he said.

Another man spoke.

"He was pretty near canned up in the _Waggon and Horses_ that night, weren't he, Jim?"

"Yes, 'e 'adn't 'alf copped it...."

"Not standing treat much, neither; he was in the bar, all on his own...."

"So 'e was; we talked about it...."

The fat, scared-eyed man made another attempt.

"She got the key off of me--she 'ad the number of it--she come into my shop of a Tuesday evening...."

n.o.body heeded him.

"Shut your heads," a heavy labourer commented gruffly, "she hasn't been found yet. 'Ere's the inspectors; we shall know more in a bit."

Two inspectors had come up and were talking to the constables who guarded the gate. The little fat man ran eagerly forward, saying that she had bought the key of him. "I remember the number, because of it's being three one's and three three's--111333!" he exclaimed excitedly.

An inspector put him aside.

"n.o.body's been in?" he asked of one of the constables.

"No, sir."

"Then you, Brackley, come with us; you, Smith, keep the gate. There's a squad on its way."

The two inspectors and the constable pa.s.sed down the alley and entered the house. They mounted the wide carved staircase.

"This don't look as if he'd been out much lately," one of the inspectors muttered as he kicked aside a litter of dead leaves and paper that lay outside Oleron's door. "I don't think we need knock--break a pane, Brackley."

The door had two glazed panels; there was a sound of shattered gla.s.s; and Brackley put his hand through the hole his elbow had made and drew back the latch.

"Faugh!"... choked one of the inspectors as they entered. "Let some light and air in, quick. It stinks like a hea.r.s.e--"

The a.s.sembly out in the square saw the red blinds go up and the windows of the old house flung open.

"That's better," said one of the inspectors, putting his head out of a window and drawing a deep breath.... "That seems to be the bedroom in there; will you go in, Simms, while I go over the rest?..."

They had drawn up the bedroom blind also, and the waxy-white, emaciated man on the bed had made a blinker of his hand against the torturing flood of brightness. Nor could he believe that his hearing was not playing tricks with him, for there were two policemen in his room, bending over him and asking where "she" was. He shook his head.

"This woman Bengough... goes by the name of Miss Elsie Bengough... d'ye hear? Where is she?... No good, Brackley; get him up; be careful with him; I'll just shove _my_ head out of the window, I think...."

The other inspector had been through Oleron's study and had found nothing, and was now in the kitchen, kicking aside an ankle-deep ma.s.s of vegetable refuse that c.u.mbered the floor. The kitchen window had no blind, and was over-shadowed by the blank end of the house across the alley. The kitchen appeared to be empty.

But the inspector, kicking aside the dead flowers, noticed that a shuffling track that was not of his making had been swept to a cupboard in the corner. In the upper part of the door of the cupboard was a square panel that looked as if it slid on runners. The door itself was closed.