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.”
She smiled very faintly, a smile which had in it no single element of joy or humour.
“I can quite understand my father intervening,” she said. “He poses as being rather a patron of artistically-perpetrated crime. Sue is his favourite author, and I believe that he has exceedingly grim ideas as to duelling and fighting generally. He was in prison once for six months at New Orleans for killing a man who insulted my mother. Nothing in the world would ever have convinced him that he had not done a perfectly legitimate thing.”
“I am expecting to find him quite an interesting study, when I know him better,” Francis pronounced. “My only fear is that he will count me an unfriendly person and refuse to have anything to do with me.”
“I am not at all sure,” she said indifferently, “that it would not be very much better for you if he did.”
“I cannot admit that,” he answered, smiling. “I think that our paths in life are too far apart for either of us to influence the other. You don’t share his tastes, do you?”
“Which ones?” she asked, after a moment’s silence.
“Well, boxing for one,” he replied. “They tell me that he is the greatest living patron of the ring, both here and in America.”
“I have never been to a fight in my life,” she confessed. “I hope that I never may.”
“I can’t go so far as that,” he declared, “but boxing isn’t altogether one of my hobbies. Can’t we leave your father and his tastes alone for the present? I would rather talk about—ourselves. Tell me what you care about most in life?”
“Nothing,” she answered listlessly.
“But that is only a phase,” he persisted. “You have had terrible trials, I know, and they must have affected your outlook on life, but you are still young, and while one is young life is always worth having.”
“I thought so once,” she assented. “I don’t now.”
“But there must be—there will be compensations,” he assured her. “I know that just now you are suffering from the reaction—after all you have gone through. The memory of that will pass.”
“The memory of what I have gone through will never pass,” she answered.
There was a moment’s intense silence, a silence pregnant with reminiscent drama. The little room rose up before his memory—the woman’s hopeless, hating eyes, the quivering thread of steel, the dead man’s mocking words. He seemed at that moment to see into the recesses of her mind. Was it remorse that troubled her, he wondered? Did she lack strength to realise that in that half-hour at the inquest he had placed on record for ever his judgment of her deed? Even to think of it now was morbid. Although he would never have confessed it even to himself, there was growing daily in his mind some idea of reward. She had never thanked him—he hoped
