got out of the window on the other side of the house, and went back to the inn across the dewy park. The French window of the sitting-room which had let her out let us both in. No one was stirring, so no one save she and I were any the wiser as to that night’s work.
It was like a garden party next day, when lawyers and executors and aunts and relations met on the terrace in front of Sefton Manor House.
Her eyes were downcast. She followed her aunt demurely over the house and the grounds.
‘Your decision,’ said my great-uncle’s solicitor, ‘has to be given within the hour.’
‘My cousin and I will announce it within that time,’ I said, and I at once gave her my arm.
Arrived at the sundial we stopped.
‘This is my proposal,’ I said: ‘We will say that we decide that the house is yours – we will spend the £20,000 in restoring it and the grounds. By the time that’s done we can decide who is to have it.’
‘But how?’
‘Oh, we’ll draw lots, or toss a halfpenny, or anything you like.’
‘I’d rather decide now,’ she said; ‘you take it.’
‘No, you shall.’
‘I’d rather you had it. I – I don’t feel so greedy as I did yesterday,’ she said.
‘Neither do I. Or at any rate not in the same way.’
‘Do – do take the house,’ she said very earnestly.
Then I said: ‘My cousin Selwyn, unless you take the house, I shall make you an offer of marriage.’
‘Oh!’ she breathed.
‘And when you have declined it, on the very proper ground of our too slight acquaintance, I will take my turn at declining. I will decline the house. Then, if you are obdurate, it will become an asylum. Don’t be obdurate. Pretend to take the house and—’
She looked at me rather piteously.
‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I will pretend to take the house, and when it is restored—’
‘We’ll spin the penny.’
So before the waiting relations the house was adjudged to my cousin Selwyn. When the restoration was complete I met Selwyn at the sundial. We had met there often in the course of the restoration, in which business we both took an extravagant interest.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘we’ll spin the penny. Heads you take the house, tails it comes to me.’
I spun the coin – it fell on the brick steps of the sundial, and stuck upright there, wedged between two bricks. She laughed; I laughed.
‘It’s not my house,’ I said.
‘It’s not my house,’ said she.
‘Dear,’ said I, and we were neither of us laughing then, ‘can’t it be our house?’
And, thank God, our house it is.
I
Roger Wroxham looked round his studio before he blew out the candle, and wondered whether, perhaps, he looked for the last time. It was large and empty, yet his trouble had filled it, and, pressing against him in the prison of those four walls, forced him out into the world, where lights and voices and the presence of other men should give him room to draw back, to set a space between it and him, to decide whether he would ever face it again – he and it alone together. The nature of his trouble is not germane to this story. There was a woman in it, of course, and money, and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments – and all of those reached out tendrils that wove and interwove till they made a puzzle-problem of which heart and brain were now weary. It was as though his life depended on his deciphering the straggling characters traced by some spider who, having fallen into the ink-well, had dragged clogged legs in a black zig-zag across his map of the world.
He blew out the candle and went quietly downstairs. It was nine at night, a soft night of May in Paris. Where should he go? He thought of the Seine, and took – an omnibus. The chestnut trees of the Boulevards brushed against the sides of the one that he boarded blindly in the first light street. He did not know where the omnibus was going. It did not matter. When at last it stopped he got off, and so strange was the place to him that for an instant it almost seemed as though the trouble itself had been left behind. He did not feel it in the length of three or four streets that he traversed slowly. But in the open space, very light and lively, where he recognised the Taverne de Paris and knew himself in Montmartre, the trouble set its teeth in his heart again, and he broke away from the lamps and the talk to struggle with it in the dark quiet streets beyond.
A man braced for such a fight has little thought to spare for the detail of his surroundings. The next thing that Wroxham knew of the outside world was the fact that he had known for some time that he was not alone in the street. There was someone on the other side of the road keeping pace with him – yes, certainly keeping pace, for, as he slackened his own, the feet on the other pavement also went more slowly. And now they were four feet, not two. Where had the other man sprung from? He had not been there a moment ago. And now, from an archway a little ahead of him, a third man came.
Wroxham stopped. Then three men converged upon him, and, like a sudden magic-lantern picture on a sheet prepared, there came to him all that he had heard and read of Montmartre – dark archways, knives, Apaches, and men who went away from homes where they were beloved and never again returned. He, too – well, if he never returned again, it would be quicker than the Seine, and, in the event of ultramundane possibilities, safer.
He stood still and laughed in the face of the man who first reached him.
‘Well, my friend?’ said he, and at that the other two drew close.
‘Monsieur walks late,’ said the first, a little confused, as it seemed, by that laugh.
‘And will walk still later, if it pleases him,’ said Roger. ‘Goodnight, my friends.’
‘Ah!’ said the second, ‘friends do not say adieu so quickly. Monsieur will tell us the hour.’
‘I have not a watch,’ said Roger, quite truthfully.
‘I will assist you to search for it,’ said the third man, and laid a hand on his arm.
Roger threw it off. That was instinctive. One may be resigned to a man’s knife between one’s ribs, but not to his hands pawing one’s shoulders. The man with the hand staggered back.
‘The knife searches more surely,’ said the second.
‘No, no,’ said the third quickly, ‘he is too heavy. I for one will not carry him afterwards.’
They closed round him, hustling him between them. Their pale, degenerate faces spun and swung round him
