CHAPTER I

With a somewhat prolonged grinding of the brakes and an unnecessary

amount of fuss in the way of letting off steam, the afternoon train from

London came to a standstill in the station at Detton Magna. An elderly

porter, putting on his coat as he came, issued, with the dogged aid of

one bound by custom to perform a hopeless mission, from the small,

redbrick lamp room. The station master, occupying a position of vantage

in front of the shed which enclosed the booking office, looked up and

down the lifeless row of closed and streaming windows, with an expectancy

dulled by daily disappointment, for the passengers who seldom alighted.

On this occasion no records were broken. A solitary young man stepped out

on to the wet and flinty platform, handed over the half of a third-class

return ticket from London, passed through the two open doors and

commenced to climb the long ascent which led into the town.

He wore no overcoat, and for protection against the inclement weather

he was able only to turn up the collar of his well-worn blue serge coat.

The damp of a ceaselessly wet day seemed to have laid its cheerless

pall upon the whole exceedingly ugly landscape. The hedges, blackened

with smuts from the colliery on the other side of the slope, were

dripping also with raindrops. The road, flinty and light grey in colour,

was greasy with repellent-looking mud--there were puddles even in the

asphalt-covered pathway which he trod. On either side of him stretched

the shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of an industrial neighbourhood.

The town-village which stretched up the hillside before him presented

scarcely a single redeeming feature. The small, grey stone houses, hard

and unadorned, were interrupted at intervals by rows of brand-new,

red-brick cottages. In the background were the tall chimneys of several

factories; on the left, a colliery shaft raised its smoke-blackened

finger to the lowering clouds.

After his first glance around at these familiar and unlovely objects,

Philip Romilly walked with his head a little thrown back, his eyes lifted

as though with intent to the melancholy and watery skies. He was a young

man well above medium height, slim, almost inclined to be angular, yet

with a good carriage notwithstanding a stoop which seemed more the

result of an habitual depression than occasioned by any physical

weakness. His features were large, his mouth querulous, a little

discontented, his eyes filled with the light of a silent and rebellious

bitterness which seemed, somehow, to have found a more or less permanent

abode in his face. His clothes, although they were neat, had seen better

days. He was ungloved, and he carried under his arm a small parcel,

which appeared to contain a book, carefully done up in brown paper.

As he reached the outskirts of the village he slackened his pace.

Standing a little way back from the road, from which they were separated

by an ugly, gravelled playground, were the familiar school buildings,

with the usual inscription carved in stone above the door. He laid his

hand upon the wooden gate and paused. From inside he could catch the

drone of children's voices. He glanced at his watch. It was barely twenty

minutes past four. For a moment he hesitated. Then he strolled on, and,

turning at the gate of an adjoining cottage, the nearest to the schools

of a little unlovely row, he tried the latch, found it yield to his

touch, and stepped inside. He closed the door behind him and turned, with

a little weary sigh of content, towards a large easy-chair drawn up in

front of the fire. For a single moment he seemed about to throw himself

into its depths--his long fingers, indeed, a little blue with the cold,

seemed already on their way towards the genial warmth of the flames. Then

he stopped short. He stood perfectly still in an attitude of arrested

motion, his eyes, wonderingly at first, and then with a strange,

unanalysable expression, seeming to embark upon a lengthened, a

scrupulous, an almost horrified estimate of his surroundings.

To the ordinary observer there would have been nothing remarkable in the

appearance of the little room, save its entirely unexpected air of luxury

and refinement. There was a small Chippendale sideboard against the wall,

a round, gate-legged table on which stood a blue china bowl filled with

pink roses, a couple of luxurious easy-chairs, some old prints upon the

wall. On the sideboard was a basket, as yet unpacked, filled with

hothouse fruit, and on a low settee by the side of one of the easy-chairs

were a little pile of reviews, several volumes of poetry, and a couple of

library books. In the centre of the mantelpiece was a photograph, the

photograph of a man a little older, perhaps, than this newly-arrived

visitor, with rounder face, dressed in country tweeds, a flower in his

buttonhole, the picture of a prosperous man, yet with a curious, almost

disturbing likeness to the pale, over-nervous, loose-framed youth whose

eye had been attracted by its presence, and who was gazing at it,

spellbound.

"Douglas!" he muttered. "Douglas!"

He flung his hat upon the table and for a moment his hand rested upon his

forehead. He was confronted with a mystery which baffled him, a mystery

whose sinister possibilities were slowly framing themselves in his mind.

While he stood there he was suddenly conscious of the sound of the

opening gate, brisk footsteps up the tiled way, the soft swirl of a

woman's skirt. The latch was raised, the door opened and closed. The

newcomer stood upon the threshold, gazing at him.

"Philip!" she exclaimed. "Why, Philip!"

There was a curious change in the girl's tone, from almost glad welcome

to a note of abrupt fear in that last pronouncement of his name. She

stood looking at him, the victim, apparently, of so many emotions that

there was nothing definite to be drawn either from her tone or

expression. She was a young woman of medium height and slim, delicate

figure, attractive, with large, discontented mouth, full, clear eyes and

a wealth of dark brown hair. She was very simply dressed and yet in a

manner which scarcely suggested the school-teacher. To the man who

confronted her, his left hand gripping the mantelpiece, his eyes filled

with a flaming jealousy, there was something entirely new in the hang of

her well-cut skirt, the soft colouring of her low-necked blouse, the

greater animation of her piquant face with its somewhat dazzling

complexion. His hand flashed out towards her as he asked his question.

"What does it mean, Beatrice?"

She showed signs of recovering herself. With a little shrug of the

shoulders she turned towards the door which led into an inner room.

"Let me get you some tea, Philip," she begged. "You look so cold and

wet."

"Stay here, please," he insisted.

She paused reluctantly. There was a curious lack of anything peremptory

in his manner, yet somehow, although she would have given the world

to have passed for a few moments into the shelter of the little kitchen

beyond, she was impelled to do as he bade her.

"Don't be silly, Philip," she said petulantly. "You know you want some

tea, and so do I. Sit down, please, and make yourself comfortable. Why

didn't you let me know you were coming?"

"Perhaps it would have been better," he agreed quietly. "However, since I

am here, answer my question."

She drew a little breath. After all, although she was lacking in any real

strength of character, she was filled with a certain compensatory

doggedness. His challenge was there to be faced. There was no way out of

it. She would have lied willingly enough but for the sheer futility of

falsehood. She commenced the task of bracing herself for the struggle.

"You had better," she said, "frame your question a little more exactly. I

will then try to answer it."

He was stung by her altered demeanour, embarrassed by an avalanche of

words. A hundred questions were burning upon his lips. It was by a great

effort of self-control that he remained coherent.

"The last time I visited you," he began, "was three months ago. Your

cottage then was furnished as one would expect it to be furnished. You

had a deal dresser, a deal table, one rather hard easy-chair and a very

old wicker one. You had, if I remember rightly, a strip of linoleum upon

the floor, and a single rug. Your flowers were from the hedges and your

fruit from the one apple tree in the garden behind. Your clothes--am I

mistaken about your clothes or are you dressed more expensively?"

"I am dressed more expensively," she admitted.

"You and I both know the value of these things," he went on, with a

little sweep of the hand. "We know the value of them because we were once

accustomed to them, because we have both since experienced the passionate

craving for them or the things they represent. Chippendale furniture, a

Turkey carpet, roses in January, hothouse fruit, Bartolozzi prints, do

not march with an income of fifty pounds a year."

"They do not," she assented equably. "All the things which you see here

and which you have mentioned, are presents."

His forefinger shot out with a sudden vigour towards the photograph.

"From him?"

"From Douglas," she admitted, "from your cousin."

He took the photograph into his hand, looked at it for a moment, and

dashed it into the grate. The glass of the frame was shivered into a

hundred pieces. The girl only shrugged her shoulders. She was holding

herself in reserve. As for him, his eyes were hot, there was a dry

choking in his throat. He had passed through many weary and depressed

days, struggling always against the grinding monotony of life and his

surroundings. Now for the first time he felt that there was something

worse.

"What does it mean?" he asked once more.

She seemed almost to dilate as she answered him. Her feet were firmly

planted upon the ground. There was a new look in her face, a look of

decision. She was more or less a coward but she felt no fear. She even

leaned a little towards him and looked him in the face.

"It means," she pronounced slowly, "exactly what it seems to mean."

The words conveyed horrible things to him, but he was speechless. He

could only wait.

"You and I, Philip," she continued, "have been--well, I suppose we should

call it engaged--for three years. During those three years I have earned,

by disgusting and wearisome labour, just enough to keep me alive in a

world which has had nothing to offer me but ugliness and discomfort and

misery. You, as you admitted last time we met, have done no better. You

have lived in a garret and gone often hungry to bed. For three years this

has been going on. All that time I have waited for you to bring something

human, something reasonable, something warm into my life, and you have

failed. I have passed, in those three years, from twenty-three to

twenty-six. In three more I shall be in my thirtieth year--that is to

say, the best time of my life will have passed. You see, I have been

thinking, and I have had enough."

He stood quite dumb. The girl's newly-revealed personality seemed to fill

the room. He felt crowded out. She was, at that stage, absolutely

mistress of the situation.... She passed him carelessly by, flung herself

into the easy-chair and crossed her legs. As though he were looking at

some person in another world, he realized that she was wearing shoes of

shapely cut, and silk stockings.

"Our engagement," she went on, "was at first the dearest thing in life to

me. It could have been the most wonderful thing in life. I am only an

ordinary person with an ordinary character, but I have the capacity to

love unselfishly, and I am at heart as faithful and as good as any other

woman. But there is my birthright. I have had three years of sordid and

utterly miserable life, teaching squalid, dirty, unlovable children

things they had much better not know. I have lived here, here in Detton

Magna, among the smuts and the mists, where the flowers seem withered and

even the meadows are stony, where the people are hard and coarse as their

ugly houses, where virtue is ugly, and vice is ugly, and living is ugly,

and death is fearsome. And now you see what I have chosen--not in a

moment's folly, mind, because I am not foolish; not in a moment's

passion, either, because until now the only real feeling I have had in

life was for you. But I have chosen, and I hold to my choice."

"They won't let you stay here," he muttered.

"They needn't," she answered calmly. "There are other ways in which I can

at least earn as much as the miserable pittance doled out to me here. I

have avoided even considering them before. Shall I tell you why? Because

I didn't want to face the temptation they might bring with them. I always

knew what would happen if escape became hopeless. It's the ugliness I

can't stand--the ugliness of cheap food, cheap clothes, uncomfortable

furniture, coarse voices, coarse friends if I would have them. How do you

suppose I have lived here these last three years, a teacher in the

national schools? Look up and down this long, dreary street, at the names

above the shops, at the villas in which the tradespeople live, and ask

yourself where my friends were to come from? The clergyman, perhaps? He

is over seventy, a widower, and he never comes near the place. Why, I'd

have been content to have been patronized if there had been anyone here

to do it, who wore the right sort of clothes and said the right sort of

thing in the right tone. But the others--well, that's done with."

He remained curiously dumb. His eyes were fixed upon the fragments of the

photograph in the grate. In a corner of the room an old-fashioned clock

ticked wheezily. A lump of coal fell out on the hearth, which she

replaced mechanically with her foot. His silence seemed to irritate and

perplex her. She looked away from him, drew her chair a little closer

to the fire, and sat with her head resting upon her hands. Her tone had

become almost meditative.

"I knew that this would come one day," she went on. "Why don't you speak

and get it over? Are you waiting to clothe your phrases? Are you afraid

of the naked words? I'm not. Let me hear them. Don't be more melodramatic

than you can help because, as you know, I am cursed with a sense of

humour, but don't stand there saying nothing."

He raised his eyes and looked at her in silence, an alternative which she

found it hard to endure. Then, after a moment's shivering recoil into her

chair, she sprang to her feet.

"Listen," she cried passionately, "I don't care what you think! I tell

you that if you were really a man, if you had a man's heart in your body,

you'd have sinned yourself before now--robbed some one, murdered them,

torn the things that make life from the fate that refuses to give them.

What is it they pay you," she went on contemptuously, "at that miserable

art school of yours? Sixty pounds a year! How much do you get to eat and

drink out of that? What sort of clothes have you to wear? Are you

content? Yet even you have been better off than I. You have always your

chance. Your play may be accepted or your stories published. I haven't

even had that forlorn hope. But even you, Philip, may wait too long.

There are too many laws, nowadays, for life to be lived naturally. If I

were a man, a man like you, I'd break them."

Her taunts apparently moved him no more than the inner tragedy which her

words had revealed. He did not for one moment give any sign of abandoning

the unnatural calm which seemed to have descended upon him. He took up

his hat from the table, and thrust the little brown paper parcel which he

had been carrying, into his pocket. His eyes for a single moment met the

challenge of hers, and again she was conscious of some nameless,

inexplicable fear.

"Perhaps," he said, as he turned away, "I may do that."

His hand was upon the latch before she realized that he was actually

going. She sprang to her feet. Abuse, scorn, upbraidings, even

violence--she had been prepared for all of these. There was something

about this self-restraint, however, this strange, brooding silence, which

terrified her more than anything she could have imagined.

"Philip!" she shrieked. "You're not going? You're not going like this?

You haven't said anything!"

He closed the door with firm fingers. Her knees trembled, she was

conscious of an unexpected weakness. She abandoned her first intention of

following him, and stood before the window, holding tightly to the sash.

He had reached the gate now and paused for a moment, looking up the long,

windy street. Then he crossed to the other side of the road, stepped over

a stile and disappeared, walking without haste, with firm footsteps,

along a cindered path which bordered the sluggish-looking canal. He had

come and gone, and she knew what fear was!

CHAPTER II

The railway station at Detton Magna presented, if possible, an even

more dreary appearance than earlier in the day, as the time drew near

that night for the departure of the last train northwards. Its long strip

of flinty platform was utterly deserted. Around the three flickering

gas-lamps the drizzling rain fell continuously. The weary porter came

yawning out of his lamp room into the booking office, where the station

master sat alone, his chair turned away from the open wicket window to

the smouldering embers of the smoky fire.

"No passengers to-night, seemingly," the latter remarked to his

subordinate.

"Not a sign of one," was the reply. "That young chap who came down from

London on a one-day return excursion, hasn't gone back, either. That'll

do his ticket in."

The outside door was suddenly opened and closed. The sound of footsteps

approaching the ticket window was heard. A long, white hand was thrust

through the aperture, a voice was heard from the invisible outside.

"Third to Detton Junction, please."

The station-master took the ticket from a little rack, received the exact

sum he demanded, swept it into the till, and resumed his place before the

fire. The porter, with the lamp in his hand, lounged out into the

booking-hall. The prospective passenger, however, was nowhere in sight.

He looked back into the office.

"Was that Jim Spender going up to see his barmaid again?" he asked his

superior.

The station master yawned drowsily.

"Didn't notice," he answered. "What an old woman you're getting, George!

Want to know everybody's business, don't you?"

The porter withdrew, a little huffed. When, a few minutes later, the

train drew in, he even avoided ostentatiously a journey to the far end of

the platform to open the door for the solitary passenger who was standing

there. He passed up the train and slammed the door without even glancing

in at the window. Then he stood and watched the red lights disappear.

"Was it Jim?" the station master asked him, on their way out.

"Didn't notice," his subordinate replied, a little curtly. "Maybe it was

and maybe it wasn't. Good night!"

* * * * *

Philip Romilly sat back in the corner of his empty third-class carriage,

peering out of the window, in which he could see only the reflection of

the feeble gas-lamp. There was no doubt about it, however--they were

moving. The first stage of his journey had commenced. The blessed sense

of motion, after so long waiting, at first soothed and then exhilarated

him. In a few moments he became restless. He let down the rain-blurred

window and leaned out. The cool dampness of the night was immensely

refreshing, the rain softened his hot cheeks. He sat there, peering away

into the shadows, struggling for the sight of definite objects--a tree, a

house, the outline of a field--anything to keep the other thoughts away,

the thoughts that came sometimes like the aftermath of a grisly,

unrealisable nightmare. Then he felt chilly, drew up the window, thrust

his hands into his pockets from which he drew out a handsome cigarette

case, struck a match, and smoked with vivid appreciation of the quality

of the tobacco, examined the crest on the case as he put it away, and

finally patted with surreptitious eagerness the flat morocco letter case

in his inside pocket.

At the Junction, he made his way into the refreshment room and ordered

a long whisky and soda, which he drank in a couple of gulps. Then he

hastened to the booking office and took a first-class ticket to

Liverpool, and a few minutes later secured a seat in the long,

north-bound express which came gliding up to the side of the platform. He

spent some time in the lavatory, washing, arranging his hair,

straightening his tie, after which he made his way into the elaborate

dining-car and found a comfortable corner seat. The luxury of his

surroundings soothed his jagged nerves. The car was comfortably warmed,

the electric light upon his table was softly shaded. The steward who

waited upon him was swift-footed and obsequious, and seemed entirely

oblivious of Philip's shabby, half-soaked clothes. He ordered champagne a

little vaguely, and the wine ran through his veins with a curious

potency. He ate and drank now and then mechanically, now and then with

the keenest appetite. Afterwards he smoked a cigar, drank coffee, and

sipped a liqueur with the appreciation of a connoisseur. A fellow

passenger passed him an evening paper, which he glanced through with

apparent interest. Before he reached his journey's end he had ordered and

drunk another liqueur. He tipped the steward handsomely. It was the first

well-cooked meal which he had eaten for many months.

Arrived at Liverpool, he entered a cab and drove to the Adelphi Hotel. He

made his way at once to the office. His clothes were dry now and the rest

and warmth had given him more confidence.

"You have a room engaged for me, I think," he said, "Mr. Douglas Romilly.

I sent some luggage on."

The man merely glanced at him and handed him a ticket.

"Number sixty-seven, sir, on the second floor," he announced.

A porter conducted him up-stairs into a large, well-furnished bedroom. A

fire was blazing in the grate; a dressing-case, a steamer trunk and a

hatbox were set out at the foot of the bedstead.

"The heavier luggage, labelled for the hold, sir," the man told him, "is

down-stairs, and will go direct to the steamer to-morrow morning. That

was according to your instructions, I believe."

"Quite right," Philip assented. "What time does the boat sail?"

"Three o'clock, sir."

Philip frowned. This was his first disappointment. He had fancied himself

on board early in the day. The prospect of a long morning's inaction

seemed already to terrify him.

"Not till the afternoon," he muttered.

"Matter of tide, sir," the man explained. "You can go on board any time

after eleven o'clock in the morning, though. Very much obliged to you,

sir."

The porter withdrew, entirely satisfied with his tip. Philip Romilly

locked the door after him carefully. Then he drew a bunch of keys from

his pocket and, after several attempts, opened both the steamer trunk and

the dressing-case. He surveyed their carefully packed contents with a

certain grim and fantastic amusement, handled the silver brushes, shook

out a purple brocaded dressing-gown, laid out a suit of clothes for the

morrow, even selected a shirt and put the links in it. Finally he

wandered into the adjoining bathroom, took a hot bath, packed away at the

bottom of the steamer trunk the clothes which he had been wearing, went

to bed--and slept.

CHAPTER III

The sun was shining into his bedroom when Philip Romilly was awakened the

next morning by a discreet tapping at the door. He sat up in bed and

shouted "Come in." He had no occasion to hesitate for a moment. He knew

perfectly well where he was, he remembered exactly everything that had

happened. The knocking at the door was disquieting but he faced it

without a tremor. The floor waiter appeared and bowed deferentially.

"There is a gentleman on the telephone wishes to speak to you, sir," he

announced. "I have connected him with the instrument by your side."

"To speak with me?" Philip repeated. "Are you quite sure?"

"Yes, sir. Mr. Douglas Romilly he asked for. He said that his name was

Mr. Gayes, I believe."

The man left the room and Philip took up the receiver. For a moment he

sat and thought. The situation was perplexing, in a sense ominous, yet

it had to be faced. He held the instrument to his ear.

"Hullo? Who's that?" he enquired.

"That Mr. Romilly?" was the reply, in a man's pleasant voice. "Mr.

Douglas Romilly?"

"Yes!"

"Good! I'm Gayes--Mr. Gayes of Gayes Brothers. My people wrote me last

night from Leicester that you would be here this morning. You are

crossing, aren't you, on the _Elletania_?"

Philip remained monosyllabic.

"Yes," he admitted cautiously.

"Can't you come round and see us this morning?" Mr. Gayes invited. "And

look here, Mr. Romilly, in any case I want you to lunch with me at the

club. My car shall come round and fetch you at any time you say."

"Sorry," Philip replied. "I am very busy this morning, and I am engaged

for lunch."

"Oh, come, that's too bad," the other protested, "I really want to have a

chat with you on business matters, Mr. Romilly. Will you spare me half an

hour if I come round?"

"Tell me exactly what it is you want?" Philip insisted.

"Oh! just the usual thing," was the cheerful answer. "We hear you are off

to America on a buying tour. Our last advices don't indicate a very easy

market over there. I am not at all sure that we couldn't do better for

you here, and give you better terms."

Philip began to feel more sure of himself. The situation, after all, he

realized, was not exactly alarming.

"Very kind of you," he said. "My arrangements are all made now, though,

and I can't interfere with them."

"Well, I'm going to bother you with a few quotations, anyway. See here,

I'll just run round to see you. My car is waiting at the door now. I

won't keep you more than a few minutes."

"Don't come before twelve," Philip begged. "I shall be busy until then."

"At twelve o'clock precisely, then," was the reply. "I shall hope to

induce you to change your mind about luncheon. It's quite a long time

since we had you at the club. Good-by!"

Philip set down the telephone. He was still in his pajamas and the

morning was cold, but he suddenly felt a great drop of perspiration on

his forehead. It was the sort of thing, this, which he had expected--had

been prepared for, in fact--but it was none the less, in its way,

gruesome. There was a further knock at the door, and the waiter

reappeared.

"Can I bring you any breakfast, sir?" he enquired.

"What time is it?"

"Half-past nine, sir."

"Bring me some coffee and rolls and butter," Philip ordered.

He sprang out of bed, bathed, dressed, and ate his breakfast. Then he lit

a cigarette, repacked his dressing-case, and descended into the hall. He

made his way to the hall porter's enquiry office.

"I am going to pay some calls in the city," he announced--"Mr. Romilly is

my name--and I may not be able to get back here before my boat sails.

I am going on the _Elletania_. Can I have my luggage sent there direct?"

"By all means, sir."

"Every article is properly labelled," Philip continued. "Those in my

bedroom--number sixty-seven--are for the cabin, and those you have in

your charge are for the hold."

"That will be quite all right, sir," the man assured him pocketing his

liberal tip. "I will see to the matter myself."

Philip paid his bill at the office and breathed a little more freely as

he left the hotel. Passing a large, plate-glass window he stopped

suddenly and stared at his own reflection. There was something unfamiliar

in the hang of his well-cut clothes and fashionable Homburg hat. It was

like the shadow of some one else passing--some one to whom those clothes

belonged. Then he remembered, remembered with a cold shiver which

blanched his cheeks and brought a little agonised murmur to his lips. The

moment passed, however, crushed down, stifled as he had sworn that he

would stifle all such memories. He turned in at a barber's shop, had his

hair cut, and yielded to the solicitations of a fluffy-haired young lady

who was dying to go to America if only somebody would take her, and who

was sure that he ought to have a manicure before his voyage. Afterwards

he entered a call office and rang up the hotel on the telephone.

"Mr. Romilly speaking," he announced. "Will you kindly tell Mr. Gayes, if

he calls to see me, that I have been detained in the city, and shall not

be back."

The man took down the message. Philip strolled out once more into the

streets, wandering aimlessly about for an hour or more. By this time it

was nearly one o'clock, and, selecting a restaurant, he entered and

ordered luncheon. Once more it came over him, as he looked around the

place, that he had, after all, only a very imperfect hold upon his own

identity. It seemed impossible that he, Philip Romilly, should be there,

ordering precisely what appealed to him most, without thought or care of

the cost. He ate and drank slowly and with discrimination, and when he

left the place he felt stronger. He sought out a first-class

tobacconist's, bought some cigarettes, and enquired his way to the dock.

At a few minutes after two, he passed up the gangway and boarded the

great steamer. One of the little army of linen-coated stewards enquired

the number of his room and conducted him below.

"Anything I can do for you, sir, before your luggage comes on?" the man

asked civilly.

Philip shook his head and wandered up on deck again, where there were

already a fair number of passengers in evidence. He leaned over the side,

watching the constant stream of porters bearing supplies, and the

steerage passengers passing into the forepart of the ship. With every

moment his impatience grew. He looked at his watch sometimes half a dozen

times in ten minutes, changed his position continually, started violently

whenever he heard an unexpected footstep behind him. Finally he broke a

promise he had made to himself. He bought newspapers, took them into a

sheltered corner, and tore them open. Column by column he searched them

through feverishly, running his finger down one side and up the next. It

seemed impossible to find nowhere the heading he dreaded to see, to

realize that they were entirely empty of any exciting incident. He

satisfied himself at last, however. The disappearance of a half-starved

art teacher had not yet blazoned out to a sympathetic world. It was so

much to the good.... There was a touch upon his shoulder, and he felt a

chill of horror. When he turned around, it was the steward who had

conducted him below, holding out a telegram.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said. "Telegram just arrived for you."

He passed on almost at once, in search of some one else. Philip stood for

several moments perfectly still. He looked at the inscription--_Douglas

Romilly_--set his teeth and tore open the envelope:

Understood you were returning to factory before leaving. Am posting a few

final particulars to Waldorf Hotel, New York. Staff joins me in wishing

you bon voyage.

Philip felt his heart cease its pounding, felt an immense sense of

relief. It was a wonderful thing, this message. It cleared up one point

on which he had been anxious and unsettled. It was taken for granted at

the Works, then, that he had come straight to Liverpool. He walked up and

down the deck on the side remote from the dock, driving this into his

mind.

Everything was wonderfully simplified. If only he could get across, once

reach New York! Meanwhile, he looked at his watch again and discovered

that it wanted but ten minutes to three. He made his way back down to his

stateroom, which was already filled with his luggage. He shook out an

ulster from a bundle of wraps, and selected a tweed cap. Already there

was a faint touch of the sea in the river breeze, and he was impatient

for the immeasurable open spaces, the salt wind, the rise and fall of the

great ship. Then, as he stood on the threshold of his cabin, he heard

voices.

"Down in number 110, eh?"

"Yes, sir," he heard his steward's voice reply. "Mr. Romilly has just

gone down. You've only a minute, sir, before the last call for

passengers."

"That's all right," the voice which had spoken to him over the telephone

that morning replied. "I'd just like to shake hands with him and wish him

bon voyage."

Philip's teeth came together in a little fury of anger. It was maddening,

this, to be trapped when only a few minutes remained between him and

safety! His brain worked swiftly. He took his chance of finding the next

stateroom empty, as it happened to be, and stepped quickly inside. He

kept his back to the door until the footsteps had passed. He heard the

knock at his stateroom, stepped back into the corridor, and passed along

a little gangway to the other side of the ship. He hurried up the stairs

and into the smoking-room. The bugle was sounding now, and hoarse voices

were shouting:

"Every one for the shore! Last call for the shore!"

"Give me a brandy and soda," he begged the steward, who was just opening

the bar.

The man glanced at the clock and obeyed. Philip swallowed half of it at a

gulp, then sat down with the tumbler in his hand. All of a sudden

something disappeared from in front of one of the portholes. His heart

gave a little jump. They were moving! He sprang up and hurried to the

doorway. Slowly but unmistakably they were gliding away from the dock.

Already a lengthening line of people were waving their handkerchiefs and

shouting farewells. Around them in the river little tugs were screaming,

and the ropes from the dock had been thrown loose. Philip stepped to the

rail, his heart growing lighter at every moment. His ubiquitous steward,

laden with hand luggage, paused for a moment.

"I sent a gentleman down to your stateroom just before the steamer

started, sir," he announced, "gentleman of the name of Gayes, who wanted

to say good-by to you."

"Bad luck!" Philip answered. "I must have just missed him."

The steward turned around and pointed to the quay.

"There he is, sir--elderly gentleman in a grey suit, and a bunch of

violets in his buttonhole. He's looking straight at you."

Philip raised his cap and waved it with enthusiasm. After a moment's

hesitation, the other man did the same. The steward collected his

belongings and shuffled off.

"He picked you out, sir, all right," he remarked as he disappeared in the

companionway.

Philip turned away with a little final wave of the hand.

"Glad I didn't miss him altogether," he observed cheerfully.

"Good-afternoon, Mr. Gayes! Good-by, England!"

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Raymond Greene, very soon after the bugle had sounded for dinner that

evening, took his place at the head of one of the small tables in the

saloon and wished every one good evening. It was perfectly apparent that

he meant to enjoy the trip, that he was prepared to like his fellow

passengers and that he wished them to know it. Even the somewhat

melancholy-looking steward, who had been waiting for his arrival, cheered

up at the sight of his beaming face, and the other four occupants of the

table returned his salutation according to their lights.

"Two vacant places, I am sorry to see," Mr. Greene observed. "One of them

I can answer for, though. The young lady who is to sit on my right will

be down directly--Miss Elizabeth Dalstan, the great actress, you know.

She is by way of being under my charge. Very charming and talented

young lady she is. Let us see who our other absentee is."

He stretched across and glanced at the name upon the card.

"Mr. Douglas Romilly," he read out. "Quite a good name--English, without

a doubt. I have crossed with you before, haven't I, sir?" he went on

affably, turning to his nearest neighbour on the left.

A burly, many-chinned American signified his assent.

"Why, I should say so," he admitted, "and I'd like a five-dollar bill,

Mr. Greene, for every film I've seen of yours in the United States."

Mr. Greene beamed with satisfaction.

"Well, I am glad to hear you've come across my stuff," he declared. "I've

made some name for myself on the films and I am proud of it. Raymond

Greene it is, at your service."

"Joseph P. Hyam's mine," the large American announced, watching the

disappearance of his soup plate with an air of regret. "I'm in the

clothing business. If my wife were here, she'd say you wouldn't think it

to look at me. Never was faddy about myself, though," he added, with a

glance at Mr. Greene's very correct dinner attire.

"You ought to remember me, Mr. Greene," one of the two men remarked from

the right-hand side of the table. "I've played golf with you at Baltusrol

more than once."

Mr. Greene glanced surreptitiously at the card and smiled.

"Why, it's James P. Busby, of course!" he exclaimed. "Your father's the

Busby Iron Works, isn't he?"

The young man nodded.

"And this is Mr. Caroll, one of our engineers," he said, indicating a

rather rough-looking personage by his side.

"Delighted to meet you both," Mr. Greene assured them. "Say, I remember

your golf, Mr. Busby! You're some driver, eh? And those long putts of

yours--you never took three on any green that I can remember!"

"Been playing in England?" the young man asked.

Mr. Raymond Greene shook his head.

"When I am on business," he explained, "I don't carry my sticks about

with me, and I tell you this last fortnight has been a giddy whirl for

me. I was in Berlin Wednesday night, and I did business in Vienna last

Monday. Ah! here comes Miss Dalstan."

He rose ceremoniously to his feet. A young lady who was still wearing her

travelling clothes smiled at him delightfully and sank into the chair by

his side. During the little stir caused by her arrival, no one paid any

attention to the man who had slipped into the other vacant place

opposite. Mr. Greene, however, when he had finished making known his

companion's wants to the steward, welcomed Philip Romilly genially.

"Now we're a full table," he declared. "That's what I like. I only hope

we'll keep it up all the voyage. Mind, there'll be a forfeit for the

first one that misses a meal. Mr. Romilly, isn't it?" he went on,

glancing at his left-hand neighbour's card once more. "My name's Raymond

Greene. I am an old traveller and there's nothing I enjoy more, outside

my business, than these little ocean trips, especially when they come

after a pretty strenuous time on shore. Crossed many times, sir?"

"Never before," Philip answered.

"First trip, eh?" Mr. Greene remarked, mildly interested. "Well, well,

you've some surprises in store for you, then. Let me make you acquainted

with your opposite neighbour, Miss Elizabeth Dalstan. I dare say, even if

you haven't been in the States, you know some of our principal actresses

by name."

Philip raised his head and caught a glimpse of a rather pale face, a mass

of deep brown hair, a pleasant smile from a very shapely mouth, and the

rather intense regard of a pair of wonderfully soft eyes, whose colour at

that moment he was not able to determine.

"I have had the pleasure of seeing Miss Dalstan on the stage," he

observed.

"Capital!" Mr. Raymond Greene exclaimed. "We haven't met before, have we,

Mr. Romilly? Something kind of familiar in your face. You are not by way

of being in the Profession, are you?"

Romilly shook his head.

"I am a manufacturer," he acknowledged.

"That so?" his neighbour remarked, a trifle surprised. "Queer! I had a

fancy that we'd met, and quite lately, too. I am in the cinema business.

You may have heard of me--Raymond Greene?"

"I have seen some of your films," Philip told him. "Very excellent

productions, if you will allow me to say so."

"That's pleasant hearing at any time," Mr. Greene admitted, with a

gratified smile. "Well, I can see that we are going to be quite a

friendly party. That's Mr. Busby on your right, Mr. Romilly--some

golfer, I can tell you!--and his friend Mr. Caroll alongside. The lady

next you--"

"My name is Miss Pinsent," the elderly lady indicated declared

pleasantly, replying to Mr. Greene's interrogative glance. "It is my

first trip to America, too. I am going out to see a nephew who has

settled in Chicago."

"Capital!" Mr. Raymond Greene repeated. "Now we are all more or less a

family party. What did you say your line of business was, Mr. Romilly?"

"I don't remember mentioning it," Philip observed, "but I am a

manufacturer of boots and shoes."

Elizabeth Dalstan looked across at him a little curiously. One might have

surmised that she was in some way disappointed.

"Coming over to learn a thing or two from us, eh?" Mr. Greene went on.

"You use all our machinery, don't you? Well, there's Paul Lawton on

board, from Brockton. I should think he has one of the biggest plants in

Massachusetts. I must make you acquainted with him."

Philip frowned slightly.

"That is very kind of you, Mr. Greene," he acknowledged, "but do you know

I would very much rather not talk business with any one while I am on

the steamer? I am a little overworked and I need the rest."

Elizabeth Dalstan looked at her vis-à-vis with some renewal of her former

interest. She saw a young man who was, without doubt, good-looking,

although he certainly had an over-tired and somewhat depressed

appearance. His cheeks were colourless, and there were little dark

lines under his eyes as though he suffered from sleeplessness. He was

clean-shaven and he had the sensitive mouth of an artist. His forehead

was high and exceptionally good. His air of breeding was unmistakable.

"You do look a little fagged," Mr. Raymond Greene observed

sympathetically. "Well, these are strenuous days in business. We all have

to stretch out as far as we can go, and keep stretched out, or else some

one else will get ahead of us. Business been good with you this fall, Mr.

Romilly?"

"Very fair, thank you," Philip answered a little vaguely. "Tell me, Miss

Dalstan," he went on, leaning slightly towards her, and with a note of

curiosity in his tone, "I want to know your candid opinion of the last

act of the play I saw you in--'Henderson's Second Wife'? I made up my

mind that if ever I had the privilege of meeting you, I would ask you

that question."

"I know exactly why," she declared, with a quick little nod of

appreciation. "Listen."

They talked together for some time, earnestly. Mr. Greene addressed his

conversation to his neighbours lower down the table. It was not until the

arrival of dessert that Philip and his vis-à-vis abandoned their

discussion.

"Tell me, have you written yourself, Mr. Romilly?" Elizabeth Dalstan

asked him with interest.

"I have made an attempt at it," he confessed.

"Most difficult thing in the whole world to write a play," Mr. Raymond

Greene intervened, seeing an opportunity to join once more in the

conversation. "Most difficult thing in the world, I should say. Now with

pictures it's entirely different. The slightest little happening in

everyday life may give you the start, and then, there you are--the whole

thing unravels itself. Now let me give you an example," he went on,

helping himself to a little more whisky and soda. "Only yesterday

afternoon, on our way up to Liverpool, the train got pulled up somewhere

in Derbyshire, and I sat looking out of the window. It was a dreary

neighbourhood, a miserable afternoon, and we happened to be crossing a

rather high viaduct. Down below were some meadows and a canal, and by

the side of the canal, a path. At a certain point--I should think about

half a mile from where the train was standing--this path went underneath

a rude bridge, built of bricks and covered over with turf. Well, as I sat

there I could see two men, both approaching the bridge along the path

from opposite directions. One was tall, dressed in light tweeds, a

good-looking fellow--looked like one of your country squires except that

he was a little on the thin side. The other was a sombre-looking person,

dressed in dark clothes, about your height and build, I should say, Mr.

Romilly. Well, they both disappeared under that bridge at the same

moment, and I don't know why, but I leaned forward to see them come out.

The train was there for quite another two minutes, perhaps more. There

wasn't another soul anywhere in sight, and it was raining as it only can

rain in England."

Mr. Raymond Greene paused. Every one at the table had been listening

intently. He glanced around at their rapt faces with satisfaction. He was

conscious of the artist's dramatic touch. Once more it had not failed

him. He had excited interest. In Philip Romilly's eyes there was

something even more than interest. It seemed almost as though he were

trying to project his thoughts back and conjure up for himself the very

scene which was being described to him. The young man was certainly in a

very delicate state of health, Mr. Greene decided.

"You are keeping us in suspense, sir," the elderly lady complained,

leaning forward in her place. "Please go on. What happened when they came

out?"

"That," Mr. Raymond Greene said impressively, "is the point of the

story. The train remained standing there, as I have said, for several

minutes--as many minutes, in fact, as it would have taken them seconds to

have traversed that tunnel. Notwithstanding that, they neither of them

appeared again. I sat there, believe me, with my eyes fastened upon that

path, and when the train started I leaned out of the window until we had

rounded the curve and we were out of sight, but I never saw either of

those two men again. Now there's the beginning of a film story for you!

What do you want more than that? There's dramatic interest, surprise, an

original situation."

"After all, I suppose the explanation was quite a simple one," Mr. Busby

remarked. "They were probably acquaintances, and they stayed to have a

chat."

Mr. Raymond Greene shook his head doubtfully.

"All I can say to that is that it was a queer place to choose for a

little friendly conversation," he pronounced. "They were both tall

men--about the same height, I should say--and it would have been

impossible for them to have even stood upright."

"You mentioned the fact, did you not," the lady who called herself Miss

Pinsent observed, "that it was raining heavily at the time? Perhaps they

stayed under the bridge to shelter."

"That's something I never thought of," Mr. Greene admitted, "perhaps for

the reason that they both of them seemed quite indifferent to the rain.

The young man in the dark clothes hadn't even an umbrella. I must admit

that I allowed my thoughts to travel in another direction. Professional

instinct, you see. It was a fairly broad canal, and the water was nearly

up to the towing-path. I'd lay a wager it was twelve or fifteen feet

deep. Supposing those two men had met on that narrow path and quarrelled!

Supposing--"

"Don't!"

Mr. Raymond Greene stopped short. He gazed in amazement at Elizabeth

Dalstan, who had suddenly clutched his hand. There was something in her

face which puzzled as well as startled him. She had been looking at her

opposite neighbour but she turned back towards the narrator of this

thrilling story as the monosyllable broke from her lips.

"Please stop," she begged. "You are too dramatic, Mr. Greene. You really

frighten me."

"Frighten you?" he repeated. "My dear Miss Dalstan!"

"I suppose it is very absurd of me," she went on, smiling appealingly at

him, "but your words were altogether too graphic. I can't bear to think

of what might have taken place underneath that tunnel! You must remember

that I saw it, too. Don't go on. Don't talk about it any more. I am going

upstairs for my cigarette. Are you coming to get my chair for me, Mr.

Greene, or must I rely upon the deck steward?"

Mr. Raymond Greene was a very gallant man, and he did not hesitate for a

moment. He sprang to his feet and escorted the young lady from the

saloon. He glanced back, as he left the table, to nod his adieux to the

little company whom he had taken under his charge. Philip Romilly was

gazing steadfastly out of the porthole.

"Kind of delicate young fellow, that," he remarked. "Nice face, too.

Can't help thinking that I've met or seen some one like him lately."

CHAPTER V

Philip Romilly found himself alone at last with the things which he had

craved--darkness, solitude, the rushing of the salt wind, the sense of

open spaces. On the other, the sheltered side of the steamer, long lines

of passengers were stretched in wicker chairs, smoking and drinking their

coffee, but where he was no one came save an occasional promenader. Yet

even here was a disappointment. He had come for peace, for a brief escape

from the thrall of memories which during the last few hours had become

charged with undreamed-of horrors--and there was to be no peace. In the

shadowy darkness which rested upon the white-churned sea flying past him,

he saw again, with horrible distinctness, the face, the figure of the man

who for those few brief minutes he had hated with a desperate and

passionate hatred. He saw the broken photograph, the glass splintered

into a thousand pieces. He saw the man himself, choking, sinking down

beneath the black waters; heard the stifled cry from his palsied lips,

saw the slow dawning agony of death in his distorted features. Some one

was playing a mandolin down in the second class. He heard the feet of a

dancer upon the deck, the little murmur of applause. Well, after all,

this was life. It was a rebuke of fate to his own illogical and useless

vapourings. Men died every second whilst women danced, and no one who

knew life had any care save for the measure of their own days. Some

freakish thought pleaded stridently his own justification. His mind

travelled back down the gloomy avenues of his past, along those last

aching years of grinding and undeserved poverty. He remembered his

upbringing, his widowed mother, a woman used to every luxury, struggling

to make both ends meet in a suburban street, in a hired cottage filled

with hired furniture. He remembered his schooldays, devoid of pocket

money, unable to join in the sports of others, slaving with melancholy

perseverance for a scholarship to lighten his mother's burden. Always

there was the same ghastly, crushing penuriousness, the struggle to make

a living before his schooldays were well over, the unbought books he had

fingered at the bookstalls and let drop again, the coarse clothes he had

been compelled to wear, the scanty food he had eaten, the narrow, driving

ways of poverty, culminating in his mother's death and his own fear--he,

at the age of nineteen years--lest the money for her funeral should not

be forthcoming. If there were any hell, surely he had lived in it! This

other, whose flames mocked him now, could be no worse. Sin! Crime! He

remembered the words of the girl who during these latter years had

represented to him what there might have been of light in life. He

remembered, and it seemed to him that he could meet that ghostly image

which had risen from the black waters, without shrinking, almost

contemptuously. Fate had mocked him long enough. It was time, indeed,

that he helped himself.

He swung away from the solitude to the other side of the steamer, paused

in a sheltered spot while he lit a cigarette, and paced up and down the

more frequented ways. A soft voice from an invisible mass of furs and

rugs, called to him.

"Mr. Romilly, please come and talk to me. My rug has slipped--thank you

so much. Take this chair next mine for a few minutes, won't you? Mr.

Greene has rushed off to the smoking room. I think he has just been told

that there is a rival cinema producer on board, and he is trying to run

him to ground."

Philip settled himself without hesitation in the vacant place.

"One is forced to envy Mr. Raymond Greene," he sighed. "To have work in

life which one loves as he does his is the rarest form of happiness."

"What about your own?" she asked him. "But you are a manufacturer, are

you not? Somehow or other, that surprises me."

"And me," he acknowledged frankly. "I mean that I wonder I have

persevered at it so long."

"But you are a very young man!"

"Young or old," he answered, "I am one of those who have made a false

start in life. I am on my way to new things. Do you think, Miss Dalstan,

that your country is a good place for one to visit who seeks new things?"

She turned in her chair a little more towards him. Against the background

of empty spaces, the pale softness of her face seemed to gain a new

attractiveness.

"Well, that depends," she said reflectively, "upon what these new things

might be which you desire. For an ambitious business man America is a

great country."

"But supposing one had finished with business?" he persisted. "Supposing

one wanted to develop tastes and a gift for another method of life?"

"Then I should say that New York is the one place in the world," she told

him. "You are speaking of yourself?"

"Yes!"

"You have ambitions, I am sure," she continued. "Tell me, are they

literary?"

"I would like to call them so," he admitted. "I have written a play and

three stories, so bad that no one would produce the play or publish the

stories."

"You have brought them with you?"

He shook his head.

"No! They are where I shall never see them again."

"Never see them again?" she repeated, puzzled.

"I mean that I have left them at home. I have left them there, perhaps,

to a certain extent deliberately," he went on. "You see, the idea is

still with me. I think that I shall rewrite them when I have settled down

in America. I fancy that I shall find myself in an atmosphere more

conducive to the sort of work I want to do. I would rather not be

handicapped by the ghosts of my old failures."

"One's ghosts are hard sometimes to escape from," she whispered.

He clutched nervously at the end of his rug. She looked up and down along

the row of chairs. There were one or two slumbering forms, but most were

empty. There were no promenaders in sight.

"You know," she asked, her voice still very low, "why I left the saloon a

little abruptly this evening?"

"Why?" he demanded.

"Because," she went on, "I could see the effect which Mr. Raymond

Greene's story had upon you; because I, also, was in that train, and I

have better eyesight than Mr. Greene. You were one of the two men who

were walking along the towpath."

"Well?" he muttered.

"You have nothing to tell me?"

"Nothing!"

She waited for a moment.

"At least you have not attempted to persuade me that you lingered

underneath that bridge to escape from the rain," she remarked.

"If I cannot tell you the truth," he promised, "I am not going to tell

you a lie, but apart from that I admit nothing. I do not even admit that

it was I whom you saw."

She laid her hand upon his. The touch of her fingers was wonderful, cool

and soft and somehow reassuring. He felt a sense of relaxation, felt the

strain of living suddenly grow less.

"You know," she said, "all my friends tell me that I am a restful person.

You are living at high pressure, are you not? Try and forget it. Fate

makes queer uses of all of us sometimes. She sends her noblest sons down

into the shadows and pitchforks her outcasts into the high places of

life. Those do best who learn to control themselves, to live and think

for the best."

"Go on talking to me," he begged. "Is it your voice, I wonder, that is so

soothing, or just what you say?"

She smiled reassuringly.

"You are glad because you have found a friend," she told him, "and a

friend who, even if she does not understand, does not wish to understand.

Do you see?"

"I wish I felt that I deserved it," he groaned.

She laughed almost gaily.

"What a sorting up there would be of our places in life," she declared,

"if we all had just what we deserved!... Now give me your arm. I want to

walk a little. While we walk, if you like, I will try to tell you what I

can about New York. It may interest you."

They walked up and down the deck, and by degrees their conversation

drifted into a discussion of such recent plays as were familiar to both

of them. At the far end of the ship she clung to him once or twice as the

wind came booming over the freshening waves. She weighed and measured his

criticisms of the plays they spoke of, and in the main approved of them.

When at last she stopped outside the companionway and bade him good

night, the deck was almost deserted. They were near one of the electric

lights, and he saw her face more distinctly than he had seen it at all,

realised more adequately its wonderful charm. The large, firm mouth,

womanly and tender though it was, was almost the mouth of a protector.

She smiled at him as one might smile at a boy.

"You are to sleep well," she said firmly. "Those are my orders. Good

night!"

She gave him her hand--a woman's soft and delicate fingers, yet clasping

his with an almost virile strength and friendliness. She left him with

just that feeling about her--that she was expansive, in her heart, her

sympathies, even her brain and peculiar gifts of apprehension. She left

him, too, with a curious sense of restfulness, as though suddenly he

had become metamorphosed into the woman and had found a sorely-needed

guardian. He abandoned without a second thought his intention of going to

the smoking-room and sitting up late. The thought of his empty stateroom,

a horror to him a few hours ago, seemed suddenly almost alluring, and he

made his way there cheerfully. He felt the sleep already upon his eyes.

CHAPTER VI

All the physical exhilaration of his unlived youth seemed to be dancing

in Philip Romilly's veins when he awoke the next morning to find an open

porthole, the blue sea tossing away to infinity, and his steward's

cheerful face at his bedside.

"Bathroom steward says if you are ready, sir, he can arrange for your

bath now," the man announced.

Philip sprang out of bed and reached for his Bond Street dressing-gown.

"I'll bring you a cup of tea when you get back, sir," the steward

continued. "The bathrooms are exactly opposite."

The sting of the salt water seemed to complete his new-found

light-heartedness. Philip dressed and shaved, whistling softly all the

time to himself. He even found a queer sort of interest in examining his

stock of ties and other garments. The memory of Elizabeth Dalstan's words

was still in his brain. They had become the text of his life. This, he

told himself, was his birthday. He even accepted without a tremor a

letter and telegram which the steward brought him.

"These were in the rack for you, sir," he said. "I meant to bring them

down last night but we had a busy start off."

Philip took them up on deck to read. He tore open the telegram first and

permitted himself a little start when he saw the signature. It was sent

off from Detton Magna,--

"Why did you not come as promised? What am I to do? BEATRICE."

The envelope of the letter he opened with a little more compunction. It

was written on the printed notepaper of the Douglas Romilly Shoe Company,

and was of no great length,--

"Dear Mr. Romilly,

"I understood that you would return to the factory this evening for a few

minutes, before taking the train to Liverpool. There were one or two

matters upon which I should like some further information, but as time is

short I am writing to you at the Waldorf Hotel at New York.

"I see that the acceptances due next 4th are unusually heavy, but I think

I understood you to say that you had spoken to Mr. Henshaw at the bank

concerning these, and in any case I presume there would be no difficulty.

"Wishing you every success on the other side, and a safe return,

"I am,

"Your obedient servant,

"J.L. POTTS."

"There is not the slightest doubt," Philip said to himself, as he tore

both communications into pieces and watched them flutter away downwards,

"that I am on my way to New York. If only one knew what had become of

that poor, half-starved art master!"

He went down to breakfast and afterwards strolled aimlessly about the

deck. His sense of enjoyment was so extraordinarily keen that he found it

hard to settle down to any of the usual light occupations of idle

travellers. He was content to stand by the rail and gaze across the sea,

a new wonder to him; or to lie about in his steamer chair and listen,

with half-closed eyes, to the hissing of the spray and the faint music of

the wind. His mind turned by chance to one of those stories of which he

had spoken. A sudden new vigour of thought seemed to rend it inside out

almost in those first few seconds. He thought of the garret in which it

had been written, the wretched surroundings, the odoriferous food, the

thick crockery, the smoke-palled vista of roofs and chimneys. The genius

of a Stevenson would have become dwarfed in such surroundings. A phrase,

a happy idea, suddenly caught his fancy. He itched for a pencil and

paper. Then he looked up to find the one thing wanting. Elizabeth

Dalstan, followed by a maid carrying rugs and cushions, had paused,

smiling, by his side.

"You have slept and you are better," she said pleasantly. "Now for the

next few minutes you must please devote yourself to making me

comfortable. Put everything down, Phoebe. Mr. Romilly will look after

me."

For a moment he paused before proceeding to his task.

"I want to look at you," he confessed. "Remember I have only seen you

under the electric lights of the saloon, or in that queer, violet gloom

of last night. Why, you have quite light hair, and I thought it was

dark!"

She laughed good-humouredly and turned slowly around.

"Here I am," she announced, "a much bephotographed person. Almost plain,

some journalists have dared to call me, but for my expression. On flowing

lines, as you see, because I always wear such loose clothes, and yet,

believe me, slim. As a matter of fact," she went on pensively, "I am

rather proud of my figure. A little journalist who had annoyed me, and to

whom I was rude, once called it ample. No one has ever ventured to say

more. The critics who love me, and they most of them love me because I am

so exceptionally polite to them, and tell them exactly what to say about

every new play, allude to my physique as Grecian."

"But your eyes!" he exclaimed. "Last night I thought they were grey. This

morning--why, surely they are brown?"

"You see, that is all according to the light," she confided. "If any one

does try to write a description of me, they generally evade the point by

calling them browny-grey. A young man who was in love with me," she

sighed, "but that was long ago, used to say that they reminded him of

fallen leaves in a place where the sunlight sometimes is and sometimes

isn't. And now, if you please, I want to be made exceedingly comfortable.

I want you to find the deck steward and see that I have some beef tea as

quickly as possible. I want my box of cigarettes on one side and my

vanity case on the other, and I should like to listen to the plot of your

play."

He obeyed her behests with scrupulous care, leaned back in his chair and

brought into the foreground of his mind the figures of those men and

women who had told his story, finding them, to his dismay, unexpectedly

crude and unlifelike. And the story itself. Was unhappiness so necessary,

after all? They suddenly seemed to crumble away into insignificance,

these men and women of his creation. In their place he could almost fancy

a race of larger beings, a more extensive canvas, a more splendid, a

riper and richer vocabulary.

"Nothing that I have ever done," he sighed, "is worth talking to you

about. But if you are going to be my friend--"

"Well?"

"If you are going to be my friend," he went on, with almost inspired

conviction, "I shall write something different."

"One can rebuild," she murmured. "One can sometimes use the old pieces.

Life and chess are both like that."

"Would you help me, I wonder?" he asked impulsively.

She looked away from him, out across the steamer rail. She seemed to be

measuring with her eyes the roll of the ship as it rose and fell in the

trough of the sea.

"You are a strange person," she said. "Tell me, are you in the habit of

becoming suddenly dependent upon people?"

"Not I," he assured her. "If I were to tell you how my last ten years

have been spent, you would not believe me. You couldn't. If I were to

speak of a tearing, unutterable loneliness, if I were to speak of

poverty--not the poverty you know anything about, but the poverty of bare

walls, of coarse food and little enough of it, of everything cheap and

miserable and soiled and second-hand--nothing fresh, nothing

real--"

He stopped abruptly.

"But I forgot," he muttered. "I can't explain."

"Is one to understand," she asked, a little puzzled, "that you have had

difficulties in your business?"

"I have never been in business," he answered quickly. "My name is

Romilly, but I am not Romilly the manufacturer. For the last eight years

I have lived in a garret in London, teaching false art in a third-rate

school some of the time, doing penny-a-line journalistic work when I got

the chance; clerk for a month or two in a brewer's office and sacked for

incapacity--those are a few of the real threads in my life."

"At the present moment, then," she observed, "you are an impostor."

"Exactly," he admitted, "and I should probably have been repenting it by

now but for your words last night."

She smiled at him and the sun shone once more. It wasn't an ordinary

smile at all. It was just as though she were letting him into the light

of her understanding, as though some one from the world, entrance into

which he had craved, had stooped down to understand and was telling him

that all was well. He drew his chair a little closer to hers.

"We are all more or less impostors," she said. "Does any one, I wonder,

go about the world telling everybody what they really are, how they

really live? Dear me, how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be! You

are so wise, my new friend. You know the value of impulses. You tell me

the truth, and I am your friend. I do not need facts, because facts count

for little. I judge by what lies behind, and I understand. Do not weary

me with explanations. I like what you have told me. Only, of course, your

work must have suffered from surroundings like that. Will it be better

for you now?"

"I shall land in New York," he told her, "with at least a thousand

pounds. That is about as much as I have spent in ten years. There is the

possibility of other money. Concerning that--well, I can't make up my

mind. The thousand pounds, of course, is stolen."

"So I gathered," she remarked. "Do you continue, may I ask, to be Douglas

Romilly, the manufacturer?"

He shook his head a little vaguely.

"I haven't thought," he confessed. "But of course I don't. I have risked

everything for the chance of a new life. I shall start it in a new way

and under a new name."

He was suddenly conscious of her pity, of a moistness in her eyes as she

looked at him.

"I think," she said, "that you must have been very miserable. Above all

things, now, whatever you may have done for your liberty, don't be

fainthearted. If you are in trouble or danger you must come to me. You

promise?"

"If I may," he assented fervently.

"Now I must hear the play as it stood in your thoughts when you wrote

it," she insisted. "I have a fancy that it will sound a little gloomy. Am

I right?"

He laughed.

"Of course you are! How could I write in any other way except through the

darkened spectacles? However, there's a way out--of altering it, I mean.

I feel flashes of it already. Listen."

The story expanded with relation. He no longer felt confined to its

established lines. Every now and then he paused to tell her that this or

that was new, and she nodded appreciatively. They walked for a time,

watched the seagulls, and bade their farewell to the Irish coast.

"You will have to re-write that play for me," she said, a little

abruptly, as she paused before the companionway. "I am going down to my

room for a few minutes before lunch now. Afterwards I shall bring up a

pencil and paper. We will make some notes together."

Philip walked on to the smoking room. He could scarcely believe that the

planks he trod were of solid wood. Raymond Greene met him at the entrance

and slapped him on the back:

"Just in time for a cocktail before lunch!" he exclaimed. "I was looking

everywhere for a pal. Two Martinis, dry as you like, Jim," he added,

turning round to the smoking room steward. "Sure you won't join us,

Lawton?"

"Daren't!" was the laconic answer from the man whom he had addressed.

"By-the-bye," Mr. Raymond Greene went on, "let me make you two

acquainted. This is Mr. Douglas Romilly, an English boot

manufacturer--Mr. Paul Lawton of Brockton. Mr. Lawton owns one of the

largest boot and shoe plants in the States," the introducer went on. "You

two ought to find something to talk about."

Philip held out his hand without a single moment's hesitation. He was

filled with a new confidence.

"I should be delighted to talk with Mr. Lawton on any subject in the

world," he declared, "except our respective businesses."

"I am very glad to meet you, sir," the other replied, shaking hands

heartily. "I don't follow that last stipulation of yours, though."

"It simply means that I am taking seven days' holiday," Philip explained

gaily, "seven days during which I have passed my word to myself to

neither talk business nor think business. Your very good health, Mr.

Raymond Greene," he went on, drinking his cocktail with relish. "If we

meet on the other side, Mr. Lawton, we'll compare notes as much as you

like."

"That's all right, sir," the other agreed. "I don't know as you're not

right. We Americans do hang round our businesses, and that's a fact.

Still, there's a little matter of lasts I should like to have a word or

two with you about some time."

"A little matter of what?" Philip asked vaguely.

"Lasts," the other repeated. "That's where your people and ours look

different ways chiefly, that and a little matter of manipulation of our

machinery."

"Just so," Philip assented, swallowing the rest of his cocktail. "What

about luncheon? There's nothing in the world to give you an appetite like

this sea air."

"I'm with you," Mr. Raymond Greene chimed in. "You two can have your

trade talk later on."

He took his young friend's arm, and they descended the stairs together.

"What the mischief is a last?" he inquired.

"I haven't the least idea," Philip replied carelessly. "Something to do

with boots and shoes, isn't it?"

His questioner stared at him for a moment and then laughed.

"Say, you're a young man of your word!" he remarked appreciatively.

CHAPTER VII

Philip Romilly was accosted, late that afternoon, by two young women

whose presence on board he had noticed with a certain amount of

disapproval. They were obviously of the chorus-girl type, a fact which

they seemed to lack the ambition to conceal. After several would-be

ingratiating giggles, they finally pulled up in front of him whilst he

was promenading the deck.

"You are Mr. Romilly, aren't you?" one of them asked. "Bob Millet told us

you were going to be on this steamer. You know Bob, don't you?"

Philip for a moment was taken aback.

"Bob Millet," he repeated thoughtfully.

"Of course! Good old Bob! I don't mind confessing," the young woman went

on, "that though we were all out one night together--Trocadero, Empire,

and Murray's afterwards--I should never have recognised you. Seems to me

you've got thinner and more serious-looking."

"I am afraid my own memory is also at fault," Philip remarked, a little

stiffly.

"I am Violet Fox," the young woman who had accosted him continued. "This

my friend, Hilda Mason. She's a dear girl but a little shy, aren't you,

Hilda?"

"That's just because I told her that we ought to wait until you

remembered us," the slighter young woman, with the very obvious

peroxidised hair, protested.

"Didn't seem to be any use waiting for that," her friend retorted

briskly. "Hilda and I are dying for a cocktail, Mr. Romilly."

He led them with an unwillingness of which they seemed frankly unaware,

towards the lounge. They drank two cocktails and found themselves

unfortunately devoid of cigarettes, a misfortune which it became his

privilege to remedy. They were very friendly young ladies, if a little

slangy, invited him around to their staterooms, and offered to show him

the runs around New York. Philip escaped after about an hour and made his

way to where Elizabeth was reclining in her deck chair.

"That fellow Romilly," he declared irritably, "the other one, I mean,

seems to have had the vilest tastes. If I am to be landed with any more

of his ridiculous indiscretions, I think I shall have to go overboard.

There was an enterprising gentleman named Gayes in Liverpool, who nearly

drove me crazy, then there's this Mr. Lawton who wants to talk about

lasts, and finally it seems that I dined at the Trocadero and spent the

evening at the Empire and Murray's with the two very obvious-looking

young ladies who accosted me just now. I am beginning to believe that

Douglas' life was not above suspicion."

She smiled at him tolerantly. An unopened book lay by her side. She

seemed to have been spending the last quarter of an hour in thought.

"I am rather relieved to hear," she confessed, "that those two young

people are a heritage from the other Mr. Romilly. No, don't sit down,"

she went on. "I want you to do something for me. Go into the library, and

on the left-hand side as you enter you will see all the wireless news.

Read the bottom item and then come back to me."

He turned slowly away. All his new-found buoyancy of spirits had

suddenly left him. He cursed the imagination which lifted his feet from

the white decks and dragged his eyes from the sparkling blue sea to the

rain-soaked, smut-blackened fields riven by that long thread of bleak,

turgid water. The horrors of a murderous passion beat upon his brain.

He saw himself hastening, grim and blind, on his devil-sped mission. Then

the haze faded from before his eyes. Somehow or other he accomplished his

errand. He was in the library, standing in front of those many sheets of

typewritten messages, passing them all over, heedless of what their

message might be, until he came to the last and most insignificant.

Four lines, almost overlapped by another sheet--

STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF A LONDON ART TEACHER

SUICIDE FEARED

Acting upon instructions received, the police

are investigating a somewhat curious case of

disappearance. Philip Romilly, a teacher of art in

a London school, visited Detton Magna on Friday

afternoon and apparently started for a walk along

the canal bank, towards dusk. Nothing has since

been heard of him or his movements, and

arrangements have been made to drag the canal

at a certain point.

The letters seemed to grow larger to him as he stood and read. He

remained in front of the message for an inordinately long time. Again his

imagination was at work. He saw the whole ghastly business, the police on

the canal banks, watching the slow progress of the men with their drags

bringing to the surface all the miserable refuse of the turgid waters,

the dripping black mud, perhaps at last....

He was back again on the deck, walking quite steadily yet seeing little.

He made his way to the smoking room, asked almost indifferently for a

brandy and soda, and drained it to the last drop. Then he walked up the

deck to where Elizabeth was seated, and dropped into a chair by her side.

"So I am missing," he remarked, almost in his ordinary tone. "I really

had no idea that I was a person of such importance. Fancy reading of my

own disappearance within a few days of its taking place, in the middle of

the Atlantic!"

"There was probably some one there who gave information," she suggested.

"There was the young lady whom I went to visit," he assented. "She

probably watched me cross the road and turn in at that gate and take the

path by the canal side. Yes, she may even have gone to the station to see

whether I took the only other train back to London, and found that I did

not. She knew, too, that I could only have had a few shillings in my

pocket, and that my living depended upon being in London for my school

the next morning. Yes, the whole thing was reasonable."

"And they are going to drag the canal," Elizabeth said thoughtfully.

"A difficult business," he assured her. "It is one of the most ghastly,

ill-constructed, filthiest strips of water you ever looked upon. It has

been the garbage depository of the villages through which it makes its

beastly way, for generations. I don't envy the men who have to handle the

drags."

"You do not believe, then, that they will find anything--interesting?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"That type of man," he continued, "must have a morbid mind. There will be

dead animals without a doubt, worn-out boots, filthy and decomposed

articles of clothing--"

"Don't!" she interrupted. "You know what I mean. Do leave off painting

your ghastly pictures. You know quite well what I mean. Philip Romilly is

here by my side. What can they hope to find there in his place?"

His evil moments for that afternoon were over. He answered her almost

carelessly.

"Not what they are looking for. Have you brought the paper and pencil you

spoke of? I have an idea--I am getting fresh ideas every moment now

that I picture you as my heroine. It is queer, isn't it, how naturally

you fall into the role?"

She drew a little nearer to him. He was conscious of a mysterious and

unfamiliar perfume, perhaps from the violets half hidden in her furs, or

was it something in her hair? It reminded him a little of the world the

keys into which he had gripped--the world of joyousness, of light-hearted

pleasures, the sunlit world into which he had only looked through other

men's eyes.

"Perhaps you knew that I was somewhere across the threshold," she

suggested. "Did you drag your Mona wholly from your brain, or has she her

prototype somewhere in your world?"

He shook his head.

"Therein lies the weakness of all that I have ever written," he declared.

"There have been so few in my world from whom I could garner even the

gleanings of a personality. They are all, my men and women, artificially

made, not born. Twenty-three shillings a week has kept me well outside

the locked doors."

"Yet, you know, in many ways," she reflected, "Mona is like me."

"Like you because she was a helper of men," he assented swiftly, "a woman

of large sympathies, appealing to me, I suppose, because in my solitude,

thoughts of my own weakness taunted me, weakness because I couldn't break

out, I mean. Perhaps for that reason the thought of a strong woman

fascinated me, a woman large in thoughts and ways, a woman to whom

purposes and tendencies counted most. I dreamed of a woman sweetly

omnipotent, strong without a shadow of masculinity. That is where my Mona

was to be different from all other created figures."

"Chance," she declared, "is a wonderful thing. Chance has pitchforked you

here, absolutely to my side, I, the one woman who could understand what

you mean, who could give your Mona life. Don't think I am vain," she went

on. "I can assure you that my head isn't the least turned because I have

been successful. I simply know. Listen. I have few engagements in New

York. I should not be going back at all but to see my mother, who is too

delicate to travel, and who is miserable when I am away for long. Take

this pencil and paper. Let us leave off dreaming for a little time and

give ourselves up to technicalities. I want to draft a new first act and

a new last one, not so very different from your version and yet with

changes which I want to explain as we go on. Bring your chair a little

nearer--so. Now take down these notes."

They worked until the first gong for dinner rang. She sat up in her chair

with a happy little laugh.

"Isn't it wonderful!" she exclaimed. "I never knew time to pass so

quickly. There isn't any pleasure in the world like this," she added, a

little impulsively, "the pleasure of letting your thoughts run out to

meet some one else's, some one who understands. Take care of every line

we have written, my friend."

"We might go on after dinner," he suggested eagerly.

She shook her head.

"I'd rather not," she admitted. "My brain is too full. I have a hundred

fancies dancing about. I even find myself, as we sit here, rehearsing

my gestures, tuning myself to a new outlook. Oh! You most disturbing

person--intellectually of course, I mean," she added, laughing into his

face. "Take off my rugs and help me up. No, we'll leave them there.

Perhaps, after dinner, we might walk for a little time."

"But the whole thing is tingling in my brain," he protested. "Couldn't we

go into the library? We could find a corner by ourselves."

She turned and looked at him, standing up now, the wind blowing her

skirts, her eyes glowing, her lips a little parted. Then for the first

time he understood her beauty, understood the peculiar qualities of it,

the dissensions of the Press as to her appearance, the supreme charm of a

woman possessed of a sweet and passionate temperament, turning her face

towards the long-wished-for sun. Even the greater things caught hold of

him in that moment, and he felt dimly what was coming.

"Do you really wish to work?" she asked.

He looked away from her.

"No!" he answered, a little thickly. "We will talk, if you will."

They neither of them moved. The atmosphere had suddenly become charged

with a force indescribable, almost numbing. In the far distance they saw

the level line of lights from a passing steamer. Mr. Raymond Greene, with

his hands in his ulster pockets, suddenly spotted them and did for them

what they seemed to have lost the power to do.

"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "I've been looking for you two everywhere. I don't

want to hurt that smoking room steward's feelings. He's not bad at

his job. But," he added confidentially, dropping his voice and taking

them both by the arm, "I have made a cocktail down in my stateroom--it's

there in the shaker waiting for us, something I can't talk about. I've

given Lawton one, and he's following me about like a dog. Come right this

way, both of you. Steady across the gangway--she's pitching a little.

Why, you look kind of scared, Mr. Romilly. Been to sleep, either of you?"

Philip's laugh was almost too long to be natural. Elizabeth, as though by

accident, had dropped her veil. Mr. Raymond Greene, bubbling over with

good nature and anticipation, led them towards the stairs.

CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Raymond Greene could scarcely wait until Philip had taken his place

at the dinner table that evening, to make known his latest discovery.

"Say, Mr. Romilly," he exclaimed, leaning a little forward, "do you

happen to have seen the wireless messages to-day?--those tissue sheets

that are stuck up in the library?"

Philip set down the menu, in which he had been taking an unusual

interest.

"Yes, I looked through them this afternoon," he acknowledged.

"There's a little one at the bottom, looks as though it had been shoved

in at the last moment. I don't know whether you noticed it. It announced

the mysterious disappearance of a young man of the same name as your

own--an art teacher from London, I think he was. I wondered whether it

might have been any relation?"

"I read the message," Philip admitted. "It certainly looks as though it

might have referred to my cousin."

Mr. Raymond Greene became almost impressive in his interested

earnestness.

"Talk about coincidences!" he continued. "Do you remember last night

talking about subjects for cinema plays? I told you of a little incident

I happened to have noticed on the way from London to Liverpool, about the

two men somewhere in Derbyshire whom I had seen approaching a tunnel over

a canal--they neither of them came out, you know, all the time that the

train was standing there."

Philip helped himself a little absently to whisky and soda from the

bottle in front of him.

"I remember your professional interest in the situation," he confessed.

"I felt at the time," Mr. Raymond Greene went on eagerly, "that there was

something queer about the affair. Listen! I have been putting two and two

together, and it seems to me that one of those men might very well have

been this missing Mr. Romilly."

Philip shook his head pensively.

"I don't think so," he ventured.

"What's that? You don't think so?" the cinema magnate exclaimed. "Why

not, Mr. Romilly? It's exactly the district--at Detton Magna, the message

said, in Derbyshire--and it was a canal, too, one of the filthiest I ever

saw. Can't you realise the dramatic interest of the situation now that

you are confronted with this case of disappearance? I have been asking

myself ever since I strolled up into the library before dinner and read

this notice--'_What about the other man_?'"

Philip had commenced a leisurely consumption of his first course, and

answered without undue haste.

"Well," he said, "if this young man Romilly is my cousin, it would be

the second or third time already that he has disappeared. He is an

ill-balanced, neurotic sort of creature. At times he accepts help--even

solicits it--from his more prosperous relations, and at times he won't

speak to us. But of one thing I am perfectly convinced, and that is that

there is no man in the world who would be less likely to make away with

himself. He has a nervous horror of death or pain of any sort, and in

his peculiar way he is much too fond of life ever to dream of voluntarily

shortening it. On the other hand, he is always doing eccentric things. He

probably set out to walk to London--I have known him do it before--and

will turn up there in a fortnight's time."

Mr. Raymond Greene seemed rather to resent having cold water poured upon

his melodramatic imaginings. He turned to Elizabeth, who had remained

silent during the brief colloquy.

"What do you think, Miss Dalstan?" he asked. "Don't you think that, under

the circumstances, I ought to give information to the British police?"

She laughed at him quite good-naturedly, and yet in such a way that a

less sensitive man than Mr. Raymond Greene might well have been conscious

of the note of ridicule.

"No wonder you are such a great success in your profession!" she

observed. "You carry the melodramatic instinct with you, day by day. You

see everything through the dramatist's spectacles."

"That's all very well," Mr. Greene protested, "but you saw the two men

yourself, and you've probably read about the case of mysterious

disappearance. Surely you must admit that the coincidence is

interesting?"

"Alas!" she went on, shaking her head, "I am afraid I must throw cold

water upon your vivid imaginings. You see, my eyesight is better than

yours and I could see the two men distinctly, whilst you could only see

their figures. One of them, the better-dressed, was fair and obviously

affluent, and the other was a labourer. Neither of them could in any way

have answered the description of the missing man."

Mr. Raymond Greene was a little dashed.

"You didn't say so at the time," he complained.

"I really wasn't sufficiently interested," she told him. "Besides,

without knowing anything of Mr. Romilly's cousin, I don't think any

person in the world could have had the courage to seek an exit from his

troubles by means of that canal."

"But my point," Mr. Raymond Greene persisted, "is that it wasn't suicide

at all. I maintain that the situation as I saw it presented all the

possibilities of a different sort of crime."

"My cousin hadn't an enemy in the world except himself," Philip

intervened.

"And I would give you the filming of my next play for nothing," Elizabeth

ventured, "if either of those two men could possibly have been an art

teacher.... Can I have a little more oil with my salad, please, steward,

and I should like some French white wine."

Mr. Raymond Greene took what appeared to be a positive disappointment

very good-naturedly.

"Well," he said, "I dare say you are both right, and in any case I

shouldn't like to persist in a point of view which might naturally enough

become distressing to our young friend here. Tell you what I'll do to

show my penitence. I shall order a bottle of wine, and we'll drink to the

welfare of the missing Mr. Philip Romilly, wherever he may be. Pommery,

steward, and bring some ice along."

Philip pushed away his whisky and soda.

"Just in time," he remarked. "I'll drink to poor Philip's welfare, with

pleasure, although he hasn't been an unmixed blessing to his family."

The subject passed away with the drinking of the toast, and with the

necessity for a guard upon himself gone, Philip found himself eating and

drinking mechanically, watching all the time the woman who sat opposite

to him, who had now engaged Mr. Raymond Greene in an animated

conversation on the subject of the suitability for filming of certain

recent plays. He was trying with a curious intentness to study her

dispassionately, to understand the nature of the charm on which dramatic

critics had wasted a wealth of adjectives, and of which he himself was

humanly and personally conscious. She wore a high-necked gown of some

soft, black material, with a little lace at her throat fastened by her

only article of jewellery, a pearl pin. Her hair was arranged in coils,

with a simplicity and a precision which to a more experienced observer

would have indicated the possession of a maid of no ordinary qualities.

Her mouth became more and more delightful every time he studied it; her

voice, even her method of speech, were entirely natural and with a

peculiarly fascinating inflexion. At times she looked and spoke with the

light-hearted gaiety of a child; then again there was the grave and

cultured woman apparent in her well-balanced and thoughtful criticisms.

When, at the end of the meal, she rose to leave the table, he found

himself surprised at her height and the slim perfection of her figure.

His first remark, when he joined her upon the stairs, was an almost

abrupt expression of his thoughts.

"Tell me," he exclaimed, "why were all my first impressions of you wrong?

To-night you are a revelation to me. You are amazingly different."

She laughed at him.

"I really can't do more than show you myself as I am," she expostulated.

"Ah! but you are so many women," he murmured.

"Of course, if you are going to flatter me! Give me a cigarette from my

case, please, and strike a match, and if you don't mind struggling with

this wind and the darkness, we will have our walk. There!" she added, as

they stood in the companionway. "Now don't you feel as though we were

facing an adventure? We shan't be able to see a yard ahead of us, and the

wind is singing."

They passed through up the companionway. She took his arm and he suddenly

felt the touch of her warm fingers feeling for his other hand. He gripped

them tightly, and his last impression of her face, before they plunged

into the darkness, was of a queer softness, as though she were giving

herself up to some unexpected but welcome emotion. Her eyes were half

closed. She had the air of one wrapped in silence. So they walked almost

the whole length of the deck. Philip, indeed, had no impulse or desire

for speech. All his aching nerves were soothed into repose. The last

remnants of his ghostly fears had been swept away. They were on the

windward side of the ship, untenanted save now and then by the shadowy

forms of other promenaders. The whole experience, even the regular

throbbing of the engines, the swish of the sea, the rising and falling of

a lantern bound to the top of a fishing smack by which they were passing,

the distant chant of the changing watch, all the night sights and sounds

of the seaborne hostel, were unfamiliar and exhilarating. And inside his

hand, even though given him of her great pity, a woman's fingers lay in

his.

She spoke at last a little abruptly.

"There is something I must know about," she said.

"You have only to ask," he assured her.

"Don't be afraid," she continued. "I wish to ask you nothing which might

give you pain, but I must know--you see, I am really such a ordinary

woman--I must know about some one whom you went to visit that day, didn't

you, at Detton Magna?"

He answered her almost eagerly.

"I want to talk about Beatrice," he declared. "I want to tell you

everything about her. I know that you will understand. We were brought up

together in the same country place. We were both thrown upon the world

about the same time. That was one thing, I suppose, which made us kindly

disposed towards one another. We corresponded always. I commenced my

unsuccessful fight in London. I lived--I can't tell you how--week by

week, month by month. I ate coarse food, I was a hanger-on to the fringe

of everything in life which appealed to me, fed intellectually on the

crumbs of free libraries and picture galleries. I met no one of my own

station--I was at a public school and my people were gentlefolk--or

tastes. I had no friends in London before whom I dared present myself, no

money to join a club where I might have mixed with my fellows, no one to

talk to or exchange a single idea with--and I wasn't always the gloomy

sort of person I have become; in my younger days I loved companionship.

And the women--my landlady's daughter, with dyed hair, a loud voice,

slatternly in the morning, a flagrant imitation of her less honest

sisters at night! Who else? Where was I to meet women when I didn't even

know men? I spent my poor holidays at Detton Magna. Our very loneliness

brought Beatrice and me closer together. We used to walk in those ugly

fields around Detton Magna and exchanged the story of our woes. She was a

teacher at the national school. The children weren't pleasant, their

parents were worse. The drudgery was horrible, and there wasn't any

escape for her. Sometimes she would sob as we sat side by side. She, too,

wanted something out of life, as I did, and there seemed nothing but that

black wall always before us. I think that we clung together because we

shared a common misery. We talked endlessly of a way out. For me what was

there? There was no one to rob--I wasn't clever enough. There was no way

I could earn money, honestly or dishonestly. And for her, buried in that

Derbyshire village amongst the collieries, where there was scarcely a

person who hadn't the taint of the place upon them--what chance was there

for her? There was nothing she could do, either. I knew in my heart that

we were both ready for evil things, if by evil things we could make our

escape. And we couldn't. So we tried to lose ourselves in the only fields

left for such as we. We read poetry. We tried to live in that unnatural

world where the brains only are nourished and the body languishes. It was

a morbid, unhealthy existence, but I plodded along and so did she. Then

her weekly letters became different. For the first time she wrote me with

reserves. I took a day's vacation and I went down to Detton Magna to see

what had happened."

"That was the day," she interrupted softly, "when--"

"That was the day," he assented. "I remember so well getting out of

the train and walking up that long, miserable street. School wasn't

over, and I went straight to her cottage, as I have often done before.

There was a change. Her cheap furniture had gone. It was like one of

those little rooms we had dreamed of. There was a soft carpet upon the

floor, Chippendale furniture, flowers, hothouse fruit, and on the

mantelpiece--the photograph of a man."

He paused, and they took the whole one long turn along the wind-swept,

shadowy deck in silence.

"Presently she came," he continued. "The change was there, too. She was

dressed simply enough, but even I, in my inexperience, knew the

difference. She came in--she, who had spoken of suicide a short time

ago--singing softly to herself. She saw me, our eyes met, and the story

was told. I knew, and she knew that I knew."

It seemed as though something in his tone might have grated upon her.

Gently, but with a certain firmness, she drew her hand away from his.

"You were very angry, I suppose?" she murmured.

Some instinct told him exactly what was passing in her thoughts. In a

moment he was on the defensive.

"I think," he said, "that if it had been any other man--but listen. The

photograph which I took from the mantelpiece and threw into the fire was

the photograph of my own cousin. His father and my father were brought up

together. My father chose the Church, his founded the factory in which

most of the people in Detton Magna were employed. When my grandfather

died, it was found that he was penniless. The whole of his money had gone

towards founding the Douglas Romilly Shoe Company. I won't weary with the

details. The business prospered, but we remained in poverty. When my

mother died I was left with nothing. My uncle made promises and never

kept them. He, too, died. My cousin and I quarrelled. He and his father

both held that the money advanced by my grandfather had been a gift and

not a loan. They offered me a pittance. Well, I refused anything. I spoke

plain words, and that was an end of it. And then I came back and I saw

his picture, my cousin's picture, upon the mantelpiece. I can see it now

and it looks hateful to me. All the old fires burned up in me. I

remembered my father's death--a pauper he was. I remembered how near I

had been to starvation. I remembered the years I had spent in a garret

whilst Douglas had idled time away at Oxford, had left there to trifle

with the business his father had founded, had his West End club, hunters,

and shooting. It was a vicious, mad, jealous hatred, perhaps, but I claim

that it was human. I went out of that little house and it seemed to me

that there was a new lust in my heart, a new, craving desire. If I had

thrown myself into that canal, they might well have called it temporary

insanity. I didn't, but I was mad all the same. Anything else I did--was

temporary insanity!"

Her hand suddenly came back again and she leaned towards him through the

darkness.

"You poor child," she whispered. "Stop there, please. Don't be afraid to

think you've told me this. You see, I am of the world, and I know that we

are all only human. Now, twice up and down the deck, and not a word. Then

I shall ask you something."

So they passed on, side by side, the touch of her fingers keeping this

new courage alive in his heart, his head uplifted even to the stars

towards which their rolling mast pointed. It was wonderful, this--to tell

the truth, to open the door of his heart!

"Now I am going to ask you something," she said, when they turned for the

third time. "You may think it a strange question, but you must please

answer it. To me it is rather important. Just what were your feelings for

Beatrice?"

"I think I was fond of her," he answered thoughtfully. "I know that I

hated her when she came in from the schoolhouse--when I understood. Both

of us, in the days of our joint poverty, had scoffed at principles, had

spoken boldly enough of sin, but I can only say that when she came, when

I looked into her eyes, I seemed to have discovered a new horror in life.

I can't analyse it. I am not sure, even now, that I was not more of a

beast that I had thought myself. I am not sure that part of my rage was

not because she had escaped and I couldn't."

"But your personal feelings--that is what I want to know about?" she

persisted.

He dug down into his consciousness to satisfy her.

"Think of what my life in London had been," he reminded her. "There

wasn't a single woman I knew, with whom I could exchange a word. All the

time I loved beautiful things, and beautiful women, and the thought of

them. I have gone out into the streets at nights sometimes and hung

around the entrances to theatres and restaurants just for the pleasure of

looking at them with other men. It didn't do me any good, you know, but

the desire was there. I wanted a companion like those other men had.

Beatrice was the only woman I knew. I didn't choose her. It wasn't the

selective instinct that made her attractive to me. It was because she was

the only one. I never felt anything great when I was with her," he went

on hoarsely. "I knew very well that ours were ordinary feelings. She was

in the same position that I was. There was no one else for her, either.

Do you want me to go on?"

She hesitated.

"Don't be afraid--I am not quite mad," he continued, "only I'll answer

for you the part of your question you don't put into words. Beatrice was

nothing to me but an interpretress of her sex. I never loved her. If I

had, we might in our misery have done the wildest, the most foolish

things. I will tell you why I know so clearly that I never loved her. I

have known it since you have been kind to me, since I have realised what

a wonderful thing a woman can be, what a world she can make for the man

who cares, whom she cares for."

Her fingers gripped his tightly.

"And now," she said, "I know all that I want to know and all that it is

well for us to speak of just now. Dear friend, will you remember that you

are sharing your burden with me, and that I, who am accounted something

in the world and who know life pretty thoroughly, believe in you and hope

for you."

They paused for a moment by the side of the steamer rail. She understood

so well his speechlessness. She drew her hand away from his and held it

to his lips.

"Please kiss my fingers," she begged. "That is just the seal of our

friendship in these days. See how quickly we seem to plough our way

through the water. Listen to the throbbing of that engine, always towards

a new world for you, my friend. It is to be an undiscovered country. Be

brave, keep on being brave, and remember--"

The words seemed to die away upon her lips. A shower of spray came

glittering into the dim light, like flakes of snow falling with

unexpected violence close to them. He drew her cloak around her and

moved back.

"Now," she said, "I think we will smoke, and perhaps, if you made

yourself very agreeable to the steward in the smoking room, you could get

some coffee."

"One moment," he pleaded. "Remember what? Don't you realise that there is

just one word I still need, one little word to crown all that you have

said?"

She turned her head towards him. The trouble and brooding melancholy

seemed to have fallen from his face. She realised more fully its

sensitive lines, its poetic, almost passionate charm. She was carried

suddenly away upon a wave of the emotion which she herself had created.

"Oh, but you know!" she faltered. "You see, I trust you even to know

when ... Now your arm, please, until we reach the smoking room, and

mind--I must have coffee."

CHAPTER IX

Philip Romilly, on the last day of the voyage, experienced to the full

that peculiar sensation of unrest which seems inevitably to prevail when

an oceangoing steamer is being slowly towed into port. The winds of the

ocean had been left behind. There was a new but pleasant chill in the

frosty, sunlit air. The great buildings of New York, at which he had

been gazing for hours, were standing, heterogeneous but magnificent,

clear-cut against an azure sky. The ferry boats, with their amazing human

cargo, seemed to be screeching a welcome as they churned their way across

the busy river. Wherever he looked, there was something novel and

interesting, yet nothing sufficiently arresting to enable him to forget

that he was face to face now with the first crisis of his new life. Since

that brief wireless message on the first day out, there had been nothing

disquieting in the daily bulletins of news, and he had been able to

appreciate to the full the soothing sense of detachment, the friendliness

of his fellow voyagers, immeasurably above all the daily association with

Elizabeth. He felt like one awaking from a dream as he realised that

these things were over. At the first sight of land, it was as though a

magician's wand had been waved, a charm broken. His fellow passengers, in

unfamiliar costumes, were standing about with their eyes glued upon the

distant docks. A queer sense of ostracism possessed him. Perhaps, after

all, it had been a dream from which he was now slowly awaking.

He wandered into the lounge to find Elizabeth surrounded by a little

group of journalists. She nodded to him pleasantly and waved a great

bunch of long-stemmed pink roses which one of them had brought to her.

Her greeting saved him from despair. She, at least, was unchanged.

"See how my friends are beginning to spoil me!" she cried out. "Really, I

can't tell any of you a thing more," she went on, turning back to them,

"only this, and I am sure it ought to be interesting. I have discovered a

new dramatist, and I am going to produce a play of his within three

months, I hope. I shan't tell you his name and I shan't tell you anything

about the play, except that I find more promise in it than anything I

have seen or read for months. Mr. Romilly, please wait for me," she

called after him. "I want to point out some of the buildings to you."

A dark young man, wearing eyeglasses, with a notebook and pencil in his

hand, swung around.

"Is this Mr. Douglas Romilly," he enquired, "of the Romilly Shoe Company?

I am from the _New York Star_. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Romilly. You are

over here on business, we understand?"

Philip was taken aback and for the moment remained speechless.

"We'd like to know your reason, Mr. Romilly, for paying us a visit," the

young man continued, "in your own words. How long a trip do you intend to

make, anyway? What might your output be in England per week? Women's

shoes and misses', isn't it?"

Elizabeth intervened swiftly, shaking her finger at the journalist.

"Mr. Harris," she said, "Mr. Romilly is my friend, and I am not going to

have him spend these few impressive moments, when he ought to be looking

about him at the harbour, telling you silly details about his business.

You can call upon him at his hotel, if you like--the Waldorf he is going

to, I believe--and I am sure he will tell you anything you want to know."

"That's all right, Miss Dalstan," the young man declared soothingly. "See

you later, Mr. Romilly," he added. "Maybe you'll let us have a few of

your impressions to work in with the other stuff."

Romilly made light of the matter, but there was a slight frown upon his

forehead as they passed along the curiously stationary deck.

"I am afraid," he observed, "that this is going to be a terribly hard

country to disappear in."

"Don't you believe it," she replied cheerfully. "You arrive here to-day

and you are in request everywhere. To-morrow you are forgotten--some

one else arrives. That newspaper man scarcely remembers your existence at

the present moment. He has discovered Mr. Raymond Greene.... Tell me, why

do you look so white and unhappy?"

"I am sorry the voyage is over," he confessed.

"So am I, for that matter," she assented. "I have loved every minute of

the last few days, but then we knew all the time, didn't we, that it was

just an interlude? The things which lie before us are so full of

interest."

"It is the next few hours which I fear," he muttered gloomily.

She laughed at him.

"Foolish! If there had been any one on this side who wanted to ask you

disagreeable questions, they wouldn't have waited to meet you on the

quay. They'd have come down the harbour and held us up. Don't think about

that for a moment. Think instead of all the wonderful things we are going

to do. You will be occupied every minute of the time until I come back to

New York, and I shall be so anxious to see the result. You won't

disappoint me, will you?"

"I will not," he promised. "It was only for just a moment that I felt an

idiot. It's exciting, you know, this new atmosphere, and the voyage was

so wonderful, such a perfect rest. It's like waking up, and the daylight

seems a little crude."

She held out her hand.

"You see, the gangways are going down," she pointed out. "I can see many

of my friends waiting. Remember, with your new life begins our new

alliance. Good luck to you, dear friend!"

Their fingers were locked for a moment together. He looked earnestly into

her eyes.

"Whatever the new life may mean for me," he said fervently, "I shall owe

to you."

A little rush of people came up the gangway, and Elizabeth was speedily

surrounded and carried off. They came across one another several times in

the Custom House, and she waved her hand to him gaily. Philip went

through the usual formalities, superintended the hoisting of his trunks

upon a clumsy motor truck, and was himself driven without question from

the covered shed adjoining the quay. He looked back at the huge side of

the steamer, the floor of the Custom House, about which were still dotted

little crowds of his fellow passengers. It was the disintegration of a

wonderful memory--his farewell....

* * * * *

At the Waldorf he found himself greeted with unexpected cordiality. The

young gentleman to whom he applied, after some hesitation, for a room,

stretched out his hand and welcomed him to America.

"So you are Mr. Romilly!" he exclaimed. "Well, that's good. We've got

your room--Number 602, on the ninth floor."

"Ninth floor!" Philip gasped.

"If you'd like to be higher up we can change you," the young man

continued amiably. "Been several people here enquiring for you. A young

man from the 'Boot and Shoe Trades Reporter' was here only half an hour

ago, and here's a cable. No mail yet."

He handed the key to a small boy and waved Philip away. The small boy

proved fully equal to his mission.

"You just step this way, sir," he invited encouragingly. "Those packages

of yours will be all right. You don't need to worry about them."

He led the way down a corridor streaming with human beings, into a lift

from which it appeared to Philip that he was shot on to the ninth floor,

along a thickly-carpeted way into a good-sized and comfortable bedroom,

with bathroom attached.

"Your things will be up directly, sir," the small boy promised, holding

out his hand. "I'll see after them myself."

Philip expressed his gratitude in a satisfactory manner and stood for a

few moments at the window. Although it was practically his first glimpse

of New York, the wonders of the panorama over which he looked failed even

to excite his curiosity. The clanging of the surface cars, the roar and

clatter of the overhead railway, the hooting of streams of automobiles,

all apparently being driven at breakneck speed, alien sounds though they

were, fell upon deaf ears. He could neither listen nor observe. Every

second's delay fretted him. His plans were all made. Everything depended

upon their being carried out now without the slightest hitch. He

walked a dozen times to the door, waiting for his luggage, and when at

last it arrived he was on the point of using the telephone. He feed the

linen-coated porters and dismissed them as rapidly as possible. Then he

ransacked the trunks until he found, amidst a pile of fashionable

clothing, a quiet and inconspicuous suit of dark grey. In the bathroom

he hastily changed his clothes, selected an ordinary Homburg hat, and

filled a small leather case with various papers. He was on the point of

leaving the room when his eyes fell upon the cable. He hesitated for a

moment, gazed at the superscription, shrugged his shoulders, and tore it

open. He moved to the window and read it slowly, word for word:

"Just seen Henshaw. Most disturbing interview. Tells me you have had

notice to reduce overdraft by February 1st. Absolutely declines any

further advances. Payments coming in insufficient meet wages and current

liabilities. No provision for 4th bills, amounting sixteen thousand

pounds. Have wired London for accountant. Await your instructions

urgently. Suggest you cable back the twenty thousand pounds lying our

credit New York. Please reply. Very worried. Potts."

Word by word, Philip read the cable twice over. Then it fluttered from

his fingers on to the table. It told its own story beyond any shadow of a

mistake. His cousin's great wealth was a fiction. The business to which

his own fortune and the whole of his grandfather's money had been

devoted, was even now tottering. He remembered the rumours he had heard

of Douglas' extravagance, his establishment in London, the burden of his

college debts. And then a further light flashed in upon him. Twenty

thousand pounds in America!--lying there, too, for Douglas under a false

name! He drew out one of the documents which he had packed and glanced at

it more carefully. Then he replaced it, a little dazed. Douglas had

planned to leave England, then, with this crisis looming over him. Why?

Philip for a moment sat down on the arm of an easy-chair. A grim sense of

humour suddenly parted his lips. He threw back his head and laughed.

Douglas Romilly had actually been coming to America to disappear! It was

incredible but it was true.

He left the cable carefully open upon the dressing-table, and, picking up

the small leather case, left the room. He reached the lift, happily

escaping the observation of the young lady seated at her desk, and

descended into the hall. Once amongst the crowd of people who thronged

the corridors, he found it perfectly simple to leave the hotel by one of

the side entrances. He walked to the corner of the street and drew a

little breath. Then he lit a cigarette and strolled along Broadway,

curiously light-hearted, his spirits rising at every step. He was free

for ever from that other hateful personality. Mr. Douglas Romilly, of the

Douglas Romilly Shoe Company, had paid his brief visit to America and

passed on.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

After a fortnight of his new life, Philip took stock of himself and his

belongings. In the first place, then, he owned a new name, taken bodily

from certain documents which he had brought with him from England.

Further, as Mr. Merton Ware, he was the monthly tenant of a small but not

uncomfortable suite of rooms on the top story of a residential hotel in

the purlieus of Broadway. He had also, apparently, been a collector of

newspapers of certain dates, all of which contained some such paragraph

as this:

DOUGLAS ROMILLY, WEALTHY ENGLISH BOOT

MANUFACTURER, DISAPPEARS FROM THE WALDORF ASTORIA

HOTEL. WALKS OUT OF HIS ROOM WITHIN AN HOUR OF

LANDING AND HAS NOT BEEN HEARD OF SINCE. DOWN TOWN

HAUNTS SEARCHED. FOUL PLAY FEARED.

SUPERINTENDENT SHIPMAN DECLARES HIMSELF BAFFLED.

Early on Monday morning, the police of the city

were invited to investigate a case of curious

disappearance. Mr. Douglas Romilly, an English

shoe manufacturer, who travelled out from England

on board the _Elletania_, arrived at the Waldorf

Hotel at four o'clock on Saturday afternoon and

was shown to the reservation made for him. Within

an hour he was enquired for by several callers,

who were shown to his room without result. The

apartment was found to be empty and nothing has

since been seen or heard of Mr. Romilly. The room

assigned to him, which could only have been

occupied for a few minutes, has been locked up and

the keys handed to the police. A considerable

amount of luggage is in their possession, and

certain documents of a somewhat curious character.

From cables received early this afternoon, it

would appear that the Douglas Romilly Shoe

Company, one of the oldest established firms in

England, is in financial difficulties.

Then there was a paragraph in a paper of later date:

NO NEWS OF DOUGLAS ROMILLY.

The police have been unable to discover any trace

of the missing Englishman. From further cables to

hand, it appears that he was in possession of a

considerable sum of money, which must have been on

his person at the time of disappearance, and it is

alleged that there was also a large amount, with

which he had intended to make purchases for his

business, standing to his credit at a New York

bank. Nothing has since been discovered, however,

amongst his belongings, of the slightest financial

value, nor does any bank in New York admit holding

a credit on behalf of the missing man.

"Perhaps it is time," Philip murmured, "that these were destroyed."

He tore the newspapers into pieces and threw them into his waste-basket.

On his writing-table were forty or fifty closely written pages of

manuscript. In his pocketbook were sixteen hundred dollars, and a

document indicating a credit for a very much larger amount at the United

Bank of New York, in favor of Merton Ware and another. The remainder

of his belongings were negligible. He stood at the window and looked out

across the city, the city into whose labyrinths he was so eager to

penetrate--the undiscovered country. By day and night its voices were in

his ears, the rattle and roar of the overhead railway, the clanging of

the street cars, the heavy traffic, the fainter but never ceasing

foot-fall of the multitudes. He had sat there before dawn and watched the

queer, pinky-white light steal with ever widening fingers through the

darkness, heard the yawn of the city as it seemed to shiver and tremble

before the battle of the day. At twilight he had watched the lights

spring up one by one, at first like pin pricks in the distance, growing

and widening until the grotesque shapes of the buildings from which they

sprung had faded into nothingness, and there was left only a velvet

curtain of strangely-lit stars. At a giddy distance below he could trace

the blaze of Broadway, the blue lights flashing from the electric wires

as the cable cars rushed back and forth, the red and violet glimmer of

the sky signs. He knew it all so well, by morning, by noon and night;

in rainstorm, storms which he had watched come up from oceanwards in

drifting clouds of vapour; and in sunshine, clear, brilliant sunshine, a

little hard and austere, to his way of thinking, and unseasonable.

"A week," he muttered. "She said a week. Tonight I will go out."

He looked at himself in the glass. He wore no longer the well-cut clothes

of Mr. Douglas Romilly's Saville Row tailor, but a ready-made suit of

Schmitt & Mayer's business reach-me-downs, an American felt hat and

square-toed shoes.

"She said a week," he repeated. "It's a fortnight to-day. I'll go to the

restaurant at the corner. I must find out for myself what all this noise

means, what the city has to say."

He turned towards the door and then stopped short. For almost the first

time since he had taken up his quarters here, the lift had stopped

outside. There was a brief pause, then his bell rang. For a moment Philip

hesitated. Then he stepped forward and opened the door, looking out

enquiringly at his caller.

"You Mr. Merton Ware?"

He admitted the fact briefly. His visitor was a young woman dressed in a

rather shabby black indoor dress, over which she wore an apron. She was

without either hat or gloves. Her fingers were stained with purple

copying ink, and her dark hair was untidily arranged.

"I live two stories down below," she announced, handing him a little

card. "Miss Martha Grimes--that's my name--typewriter and stenographer,

you see. The waiter who brings our meals told me he thought you were some

way literary, so I just stepped up to show you my prospectus. If you've

any typewriting you want doing, I'm on the spot, and I don't know as

you'd get it done much cheaper anywhere else--or better."

There was nothing particularly ingratiating about Miss Martha Grimes,

but, with the exception of a coloured waiter, she happened to be the

first human being with whom Philip had exchanged a word for several days.

He felt disinclined to hurry her away.

"Come in," he invited, holding the door open. "So you do typing, eh? What

sort of a machine do you use?"

"Remington," she answered. "It's a bit knocked about--a few of the

letters, I mean--but I've got some violet ink and I can make a manuscript

look all right. Half a dollar a thousand words, and a quarter for carbon

copies. Of course, if you'd got a lot of stuff," she went on, her eyes

lighting hopefully upon the little collection of manuscript upon his

table, "I might quote you a trifle less."

He picked up some of his sheets and glanced at them.

"Sooner or later," he admitted, "I shall have to have this typed. It

isn't quite ready yet, though."

He was struck by the curious little light of anticipation which somehow

changed her face, and which passed away at his last words. Under pretence

of gathering together some of those loose pages, he examined her more

closely and realised that he had done her at first scant justice. She was

very thin, and the expression of her face was spoilt by the discontented

curve of her lips. The shape of her head, however, was good. Her dark

hair, notwithstanding its temporary disarrangement, was of beautiful

quality, and her eyes, though dull and spiritless-looking, were large and

full of subtle promise. He replaced the sheets of manuscript.

"Sit down for a moment," he begged.

"I'd rather stand," she replied.

"Just as you please," he assented, smiling. "I was just wondering what to

do about this stuff."

She hesitated for a moment, then a little sulkily she seated herself.

"I suppose you think I'm a pretty forward young person to come up here

and beg for work. I don't care if you do," she went on, swinging her foot

back and forth. "One has to live."

"I am very pleased that you came," he assured her. "It will be a great

convenience to me to have my typing done on the premises, and although I

am afraid there won't be much of it, you shall certainly do what there

is."

"Story writer?" she enquired.

"I am only a beginner," he told her. "This work I am going to give you is

a play."

She looked at him with a shade of commiseration in her face.

"Sickening job, ain't it, writing for the stage unless you've got some

sort of pull?"

"This is my first effort," he explained.

"Well, it's none of my business," she said gloomily. "All I want is the

typing of it, only you should see some of the truck I've had! I've hated

to send in the bill. Waste of good time and paper! I don't suppose yours

is like that, but there ain't much written that's any good, anyway."

"You're a hopeful young person, aren't you?" he remarked, taking a

cigarette from the mantelpiece and lighting it. "Have one?"

"No, thank _you_!" she replied, rising briskly to her feet. "I'm not that

sort that sits about and smokes cigarettes with strange young men. If

you'll let me know when that work's going to be ready, I'll send the

janitor up for it."

He smiled deprecatingly.

"You're not afraid of me, by any chance, are you?" he asked.

Her eyes glowed with contempt as she looked him up and down.

"Afraid of you, sir!" she repeated. "I should say not! I've met all sorts

of men and I know something about them."

"Then sit down again, please," he begged.

She hesitated for a moment, then subsided once more unwillingly into the

chair.

"Don't know as I want to stay up here gossiping," she remarked. "You'd

much better be getting on with your work. Give me one of those

cigarettes, anyway," she added abruptly.

"Do you live in the building?" he enquired, as he obeyed her behest.

"Two flats below with pop," she replied. "He's a bad actor, very seldom

in work, and he drinks. There are just the two of us. Now you know as

much as is good for you. You're English, ain't you?"

"I am," Philip admitted.

"Just out, too, by the way you talk."

"I have been living in Jamaica," he told her, "for many years--clerk in

an office there."

"Better have stayed where you were, I should think, if you've come here

hoping to make a living by that sort of stuff."

"Perhaps you're right," he agreed, "but you see I am here--been here a

week or two, in fact."

"Done much visiting around?" she enquired.

"I've scarcely been out," he confessed. "You see, I don't know the city

except from my windows. It's wonderful from here after twilight."

"Think so," she replied dully. "It's a hard, hammering, brazen sort of

place when you're living in it from hand to mouth. Not but what we don't

get along all right," she added, a little defiantly. "I'm not grumbling."

"I am sure you're not," he assented soothingly. "Tell me--to-night I am a

little tired of work. I thought of going out. Be a Good Samaritan and

tell me where to find a restaurant in Broadway, somewhere where crowds

of people go but not what they call a fashionable place. I want to get

some dinner--I haven't had anything decent to eat for I don't know how

long--and I want to breathe the same atmosphere as other people."

She looked at him a little enviously.

"How much do you want to spend?" she asked bluntly.

"I don't know that that really matters very much. I have some money.

Things are more expensive over here, aren't they?"

"I should go to the New Martin House," she advised him, "right at the

corner of this block. It's real swell, and they say the food's

wonderful."

"I could go as I am, I suppose?" he asked, glancing down at his clothes.

She stared at him wonderingly.

"Say, where did you come from?" she exclaimed. "You ain't supposed to

dress yourself out in glad clothes for a Broadway restaurant, not even

the best of them."

"Have you been to this place yourself?" he enquired.

"Nope!"

"Come with me," he invited suddenly.

She arose at once to her feet and threw the remains of her cigarette into

the grate.

"Say, Mr. Ware," she pronounced, "I ain't that sort, and the sooner you

know it the better, especially if I'm going to do your work. I'll be

going."

"Look here," he remonstrated earnestly, "you don't seem to understand me

altogether. What do you mean by saying you're not that sort?"

"You know well enough," she answered defiantly. "I guess you're not

proposing to give me a supper out of charity, are you?"

"I am asking you to accompany me," he declared, "because I haven't spoken

to a human being for a week, because I don't know a soul in New York,

because I've got enough money to pay for two dinners, and because I am

fiendishly lonely."

She looked at him and it was obvious that she was more than half

convinced. Her brightening expression transformed her face. She was still

hesitating, but her inclinations were apparent.

"Say, you mean that straight?" she asked. "You won't turn around

afterwards and expect a lot of soft sawder because you've bought me a

meal?"

"Don't be a silly little fool," he answered good-humouredly. "All I want

from you is to sit by my side and talk, and tell me what to order."

Her face suddenly fell.

"No good," she sighed. "Haven't got any clothes."

"If I am going like this," he expostulated, "why can't you go as you are?

Take your apron off. You'll be all right."

"There's my black hat with the ribbon," she reminded herself. "It's no

style, and Stella said yesterday she wouldn't be seen in a dime show in

it."

"Never you mind about Stella," he insisted confidently. "You clap it on

your head and come along."

She swung towards the door.

"Meet you in the hall in ten minutes," she promised. "Can't be any

quicker. This is your trouble, you know. I didn't invite myself."

Philip opened the door, a civility which seemed to somewhat embarrass

her.

"I shall be waiting for you," he declared cheerfully.

CHAPTER II

Philip stepped into his own little bedroom and made scanty preparations

for this, his first excursion. Then he made his way down into the shabby

hall and was seated there on the worn settee when his guest descended.

She was wearing a hat which, so far as he could judge, was almost

becoming. Her gloves, notwithstanding their many signs of mending, were

neat, her shoes carefully polished, and although her dress was undeniably

shabby, there was something in her carriage which pleased him. Her

eyes were fixed upon his from the moment she stepped from the lift. She

was watching for his expression half defiantly, half anxiously.

"Well, you see what I look like," she remarked brusquely. "You can back

out of it, if you want to."

"Don't be silly," he replied. "You look quite all right. I'm not much of

a beau myself, you know. I bought this suit over the counter the other

day, without being measured for it or anything."

"Guess you ain't used to ready-made clothes," she observed, as they

stepped outside.

"You see, in England--and the Colonies," he added hastily, "things aren't

so expensive as here. What a wonderful city this is of yours, Martha!"

"Miss Grimes, please," she corrected him.

"I beg your pardon," he apologised.

"That's just what I was afraid of," she went on querulously. "You're

beginning already. You think because you're giving me a meal, you can

take all sorts of liberties. Calling me by my Christian name, indeed!"

"It was entirely a slip," he assured her. "Tell me what theatre that is

across the way?"

She answered his question and volunteered other pieces of information.

Philip gazed about him, as they walked along Broadway, with the eager

curiosity of a provincial sightseer. She laughed at him a little

scornfully.

"You'll get used to all the life and bustle presently," she told him. "It

won't seem so wonderful to you when you walk along here without a dollar

to bless yourself with, and your silly plays come tumbling back. Now this

is the Martin House. My! Looks good inside, don't it?"

They crossed the threshold, Philip handed his hat to the attendant and

they stood, a little undecided, at the top of the brilliantly-lit room. A

condescending maître d'hotel showed them to a retired table in a distant

corner, and another waiter handed them a menu.

"You know, half of this is unintelligible to me," Philip confessed.

"You'll have to do the ordering--that was our bargain, you know."

"You must tell me how much you want to spend, then?" she insisted.

"I will not," he answered firmly. "What I want is a good dinner, and for

this once in my life I don't care what it costs. I've a few hundred

dollars in my pocket, so you needn't be afraid I shan't be able to pay

the bill. You just order the things you like, and a bottle of claret or

anything else you prefer."

She turned to the waiter, and, carefully studying the prices, she gave

him an order.

"One portion for two, remember, of the fish and the salad," she enjoined.

"Two portions of the chicken, if you think one won't be enough."

She leaned back in her place.

"It's going to cost you, when you've paid for the claret, a matter of

four dollars and fifty cents, this dinner," she said, "and I guess you'll

have to give the waiter a quarter. Are you scared?"

He laughed at her once more.

"Not a bit!"

She looked at his long, delicate fingers--studied him for a moment.

Notwithstanding his clothes, there was an air of breeding about him,

unconcealable, a thing apart, even, from his good looks.

"Clerk, were you?" she remarked. "Seems to me you're used to spending two

dollars on a meal all right. I'm not!"

"Neither am I," he assured her. "One doesn't have much opportunity of

spending money in--Jamaica."

"You seem kind of used to it, somehow," she persisted. "Have you come

into money, then?"

"I've saved a little," he explained, with a rather grim smile, "and

I've--well, shall we say come into some?"

"Stolen it, maybe," she observed indifferently.

"Should you be horrified if I told that I had?"

"I don't know," she answered. "I'm one of those who's lived honest, and I

sometimes wonder whether it pays."

"It's a great problem," he sighed.

"It is that," she admitted gloomily. "I've got a friend--she used to live

in our place, just below me--Stella Kimbell, her name is. She and I

learnt our typewriting together and started in the same office. We stood

it, somehow, for three years, sometimes office work, sometimes at home.

We didn't have much luck. It was always better for me than for Stella,

because she was good-looking, and I'm not."

"I shouldn't say that," he remonstrated. "You've got beautiful eyes, you

know."

"You stop it!" she warned him firmly. "My eyes are my own, and I'll

trouble you not to make remarks about them."

"Sorry," Philip murmured, duly crushed.

"The men were after her all the time," the girl continued, reminiscently.

"Last place we were at, a dry goods store not far from here, the heads of

the departments used to make her life fairly miserable. She held out,

though, but what with fines, and one thing or another, they forced her to

leave. So I did the same. We drifted apart then for a while. She got a

job at an automobile place, and I was working at home. I remember the

night she came to me--I was all alone. Pop had got a three-line part

somewhere and was bragging about it at all the bars in Broadway. Stella

came in quite suddenly and almost out of breath.

"'Kid,' she said, 'I'm through with it.'

"'What do you mean?' I asked her.

"Then she threw herself down on the sofa and she sobbed--I never heard a

girl cry like that in all my life. She shrieked, she was pretty nearly in

hysterics, and I couldn't get a word out of her. When she was through at

last, she was all limp and white. She wouldn't tell me anything. She

simply sat and looked at the stove. Presently she got up to go. I put my

hands on her shoulders and I forced her back in the chair.

"'You've got to tell me all about it, Stella,' I insisted.

"And then of course I heard the whole story. She'd got fired again. These

men are devils!"

"Don't tell me more about it unless you like," he begged sympathetically.

"Where is she now?"

"In the chorus of 'Three Frivolous Maids.' She comes in here regularly."

"Sorry for herself?"

"Not she! Last time I saw her she told me she wouldn't go back into an

office, or take on typewriting again, for anything in the world. She was

looking prettier than ever, too. There's a swell chap almost crazy about

her. Shouldn't wonder if she hasn't got an automobile."

"Well, she answers our question one way, then," he remarked thoughtfully.

"Tell me, Miss Grimes, is everything to eat in America as good as this

fish?"

"Some cooking here," she observed, looking rather regretfully at her

empty plate. "I told you things were all right. There's grilled

chicken--Maryland chicken--coming, and green corn."

"Have I got to eat the corn like that man opposite?" he asked anxiously.

"You can eat it how you like," she answered.

"Watch me, if you want to. I don't care. I ain't tasted green corn since

I can remember, and I'm going to enjoy it."

"You don't like your claret, I'm afraid," he remarked.

She sipped it and set down the glass a little disparagingly.

"If you want to know what I would like," she said, "it's just a Martini

cocktail. We don't drink wines over here as much as you folk, I guess."

He ordered the cocktails at once. Every now and then he watched her. She

ate delicately but with a healthy and unashamed appetite. A little colour

came into her cheeks as the room grew warmer, her lower lip became less

uncompromising. Suddenly she laid down her knife and fork. Her eyes were

agleam with interest. She pulled at his sleeve.

"Say, that's Stella!" she exclaimed excitedly. "Look, she's coming this

way! Don't she look stunning!"

A girl, undeniably pretty, with dark, red-gold hair, wearing a long

ermine coat and followed by a fashionably dressed young man, was making

her way up the room. She suddenly recognised Philip's companion and came

towards her with outstretched hand.

"If it isn't Martha!" she cried. "Isn't this great! Felix, this is Miss

Grimes--Martha Grimes, you know," she added, calling to the young man who

was accompanying her. "You must remember--why, what's the matter with

you, Felix?"

She broke off in her speech. Her companion was staring at Philip, who was

returning his scrutiny with an air of mild interrogation.

"Say," the young man enquired, "didn't I meet you on the _Elletania_?

Aren't you Mr. Douglas Romilly?"

Philip shook his head.

"My name is Ware," he pronounced, "Merton Ware. I have certainly never

been on the _Elletania_ and I don't remember having met you before."

The young man whose name was Felix appeared almost stupefied.

"Gee whiz!" he muttered. "Excuse me, sir, but I never saw such a likeness

before--never!"

"Well, shake hands with Miss Grimes quickly and come along," Stella

enjoined. "Remember I only have half an hour for dinner now. You coming

to see the show, Martha?"

"Not to-night," that young woman declared firmly.

The two passed on after a few more moments of amiable but, on the part of

the young man, somewhat dazed conversation. Philip had resumed the

consumption of his chicken. He raised an over-filled glass to his lips

steadily and drank it without spilling a drop.

"Mistook me for some one," he remarked coolly.

She nodded.

"Man who disappeared from the Waldorf Astoria. They made quite a fuss

about him in the newspapers. I shouldn't have said you were the least

like him--to judge by his pictures, anyway."

Philip shrugged his shoulders. He seemed very little interested.

"I don't often read the newspapers.... So that is Stella."

"That is Stella," she assented, a little defiantly. "And if I were she--I

mean if I were as good-looking as she is--I'd be in her place."

"I wonder whether you would?" he observed thoughtfully.

"Oh! don't bother me with your problems," she replied. "Does it run to

coffee?"

"Of course it does," he agreed, "and a liqueur, if you like."

"If you mean a cordial, I'll have some of that green stuff," she decided.

"Don't know when I shall get another dinner like this again."

"Well, that rests with you," he assured her. "I am very lonely just now.

Later on it will be different. We'll come again next week, if you like."

"Better see how you feel about it when the time comes," she answered

practically. "Besides, I'm not sure they'd let me in here again. Did you

see Stella's coat? Fancy feeling fur like that up against your chin!

Fancy--"

She broke off and sipped her coffee broodingly.

"Those things are immaterial in themselves," he reminded her. "It's just

a question how much happiness they have brought her, whether the thing

pays or not."

"Of course it pays!" she declared, almost passionately. "You've never

seen my rooms or my drunken father. I can tell you what they're like,

though. They're ugly, they're tawdry, they're untidy, when I've any work

to do, they're scarcely clean. Our meals are thrown at us--we're always

behind with the rent. There isn't anything to look at or listen to that

isn't ugly. You haven't known what it is to feel the grim pang of a

constant hideousness crawling into your senses, stupefying you almost

with a sort of misery--oh, I can't describe it!"

"I have felt all those things," he said quietly.

"What did you do?" she demanded. "No, perhaps you had luck. Perhaps it's

not fair to ask you that. It wouldn't apply. What should you do if you

were me, if you had the chance to get out of it all the way that she

has?"

"I am not a woman," he reminded her simply. "If I answer you as an

outsider, a passer-by--mind, though, one who thinks about men and

women--I should say try one of her lesser sins, one of the sins that

leaves you clean. Steal, for instance."

"And go to prison!" she protested angrily. "How much better off would you

be there, I wonder, and what about when you came out? Pooh! Pay your bill

and let's get out of this."

He obeyed, and they made their way into the crowded street. He paused for

a moment on the pavement. The pleasure swirl was creeping a little into

his veins.

"Would you like to go to a theatre?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"You do as you like. I'm going home. You needn't bother about coming with

me, either."

"Don't be foolish," he protested. "I only mentioned a theatre for your

sake. Come along."

They walked down Broadway and turned into their own street. They entered

the tenement building together and stepped into the lift. She held out

her hand a little abruptly.

"Good night!"

"Good night!" he answered. "You get out first, don't you? I'll polish

that stuff up to-night, the first part of it, so that you can get on with

the typing."

Some half-developed fear which had been troubling her during the walk

home, seemed to have passed. Her face cleared.

"Don't think I am ungrateful," she begged, as the lift stopped. "I

haven't had a good time like this for many months. Thank you, Mr. Ware,

and good night!"

She stepped through the iron gates on to her own floor, and Philip swung

up to his rooms. Somehow, he entered almost light-heartedly. The roar of

the city below was no longer provocative. He felt as though he had

stretched out a hand towards it, as though he were in the way of becoming

one of its children.

CHAPTER III

A few nights later Philip awoke suddenly to find himself in a cold sweat,

face to face with all the horrors of an excited imagination. Once more he

felt his hand greedy for the soft flesh of the man he hated, tearing its

way through the stiff collar, felt the demoniacal strength shooting down

his arm, the fever at his finger tips. He saw the terrified face of his

victim, a strong man but impotent in his grasp; heard the splash of the

turgid waters; saw himself, his lust for vengeance unsatisfied, peering

downwards through the dim and murky gloom. It was not only a physical

nightmare which seized him. His brain, too, was his accuser. He saw with

a hideous clarity that even the excuse of motive was denied him. It was a

sense of personal loss which had driven him out on to that canal path, a

murderer at heart. It was something of which he had been robbed, an acute

and burning desire for vengeance, personal, entirely egotistical. It was

not the wrong to the woman which he resented, had there been any wrong.

It was the agony of his own personal misery. He rose from his bed and

stamped up and down his little chamber in a fear which was almost

hysterical. He threw wide open the windows, heedless of a driving

snowstorm. The subdued murmur of the city, with its paling lights,

brought him no relief. He longed frantically for some one who knew the

truth, for Elizabeth before any one, with her soft, cool touch, her

gentle, protective sympathy. He was a fool to think he could live alone

like this, with such a burden to bear! Perhaps it would not be for long.

The risks were many. At any moment he might hear the lift stop, steps

across the corridor, the ring at his bell, the plainly-clad, businesslike

man outside, with his formal questions, his grim civility. He fumbled

about in his little dressing-case until he came to a small box containing

several white pills. He gripped them in his hand and looked around,

listening. No, it was fancy! There was still no sound in the building.

When at last he went back to bed, however, the little box was tightly

clenched in his hands.

In the morning he went through his usual programme. He arose soon after

eight, lighted his little spirit lamp, made his coffee, cut some bread

and butter, and breakfasted. Then he lit a cigarette and sat down at his

desk. His imagination, however, seemed to have burnt itself out in the

night. Ideas and phrases were denied to him. He was thankful, about

eleven o'clock, to hear a ring at the bell and find Martha Grimes outside

with a little parcel under her arm. She was wearing the same shabby black

dress and her fingers were stained with copying ink. Her almost too

luxuriant hair was ill-arranged and untidy. Even her eyes seemed to have

lost their lustre.

"I've finished," she announced, handing him the parcel. "Better look and

see whether it's all right. I can't do it up properly till I've had the

whole."

He cut the string and looked at a few of the sheets. The typing was

perfect. He began to express his approval but she interrupted him.

"It's better stuff than I expected," she declared grudgingly. "I thought

you were only one of these miserable amateurs. Where did you learn to

write like that?"

Somehow, her praise was like a tonic.

"Do you like it?" he asked eagerly.

"Oh! my likes or dislikes don't matter," she replied. "It's good stuff.

You'll find the account in there. If you'd like to pay me, I'd like to

have the money."

He glanced at the neat little bill and took out his pocketbook.

"Sit down for a minute," he begged. "I'm stuck this morning--can't write

a line. Take my easy-chair and smoke a cigarette--I have nothing else

to offer you."

For a moment she seemed about to refuse. Then she flung herself into his

easy-chair, took a cigarette, and, holding it between her lips, almost

scarlet against the pallor of her cheeks, stretched upwards towards the

match which he was holding.

"Stella and her boy were over to see me last night," she announced, a

little abruptly.

"The young lady with the ermines," he murmured.

"And her boy, Felix Martin. It was through him they came--I could see

that all right. He was trying all the time to pump me about you."

"About me?"

"Oh! you needn't trouble to look surprised," she remarked. "I guess you

remember the bee he had in his bonnet that night."

"Mistook me for some one, didn't he?" Philip murmured.

She nodded.

"Kind of queer you don't read our newspapers! It was a guy named

Romilly--Douglas Romilly--who disappeared from the Waldorf Hotel. Strange

thing about it," she went on, "is that I saw photographs of him in the

newspapers, and I can't recognise even a likeness."

"This Mr. Felix Martin doesn't agree with you, apparently," Philip

observed.

"He don't go by the photographs," Martha Grimes explained. "He believes

that he crossed from Liverpool with this Mr. Douglas Romilly, and that

you," she continued, crossing her legs and smoothing down her skirt to

hide her shabby shoes, "are so much like him that he came down last night

to see if there was anything else he could find out from me before he

paid a visit to police headquarters."

There was a moment's silence. Philip was apparently groping for a match,

and the girl was keeping her head studiously turned away from him.

"What business is it of his?"

"There was a reward offered. Don't know as that would make much

difference to Felix Martin, though. According to Stella's account, he is

pretty well a millionaire already."

"It would be more useful to you, wouldn't it?" Philip remarked.

"Five hundred dollars!" Martha sighed. "Don't seem to me just now that

there's much in the world you couldn't buy with five hundred dollars."

"Well, what did you tell Mr. Felix Martin?"

"Oh, I lied, sure! He'd found out the date you came into your rooms

here--the day this man Romilly disappeared--but I told him that I'd known

you and done work for you before then--long enough before the _Elletania_

ever reached New York. That kind of stumped him."

"Why did you do that?" Philip demanded.

"Dunno," the girl replied, with a shrug of the shoulders. "Just a fancy.

I guessed you wouldn't want him poking around."

"But supposing I had been Douglas Romilly, you might at least have

divided the reward," he reminded her.

"There's money and money," Martha declared. "We spoke of that the other

day. Stella's got money--now. Well, she's welcome. My time will come, I

suppose, but if I can't have clean money, I haven't made up my mind yet

whether I wouldn't rather try the Hudson on a foggy morning."

"Well, I am not Douglas Romilly, anyway," Philip announced.

She looked up at him almost for the first time since her entrance.

"I kind of thought you were," she admitted. "I might have saved my lies,

then."

He shook his head.

"You have probably saved me from more than you know of," he replied. "I

am not Douglas Romilly, but--"

"You're not Merton Ware, either," she interrupted.

"Quite right," he agreed. "I started life as Philip Merton Ware the day I

took these rooms, and if the time should come," he went on, "that any one

seriously set about the task of finding out exactly who I was before I

was Merton Ware, you and I might as well take that little journey--was it

to the Hudson, you said, on a foggy morning?--together."

They sat in complete silence for several moments, Then she threw the end

of her cigarette into the fire.

"Well, I'm glad I didn't lie for nothing," she declared. "I didn't quite

tumble to the Douglas Romilly stunt, though. They say he has left his

business bankrupt in England and brought a fortune out here. You don't

look as though you were overdone with it."

"I certainly haven't the fortune that Douglas Romilly is supposed to have

got away with," he said quietly. "I have enough money for my present

needs, though--enough, by-the-by, to pay you for this typing," he added,

counting out the money upon the table.

"Any more stuff ready?"

"With luck there'll be some this afternoon," he promised her. "I had a

bad night last night, but I think I'll be able to work later in the day."

She looked at him curiously, at his face, absolutely devoid of colour,

his eyes, restless and overbright, his long, twitching fingers.

"Bad conscience or drugs?" she asked.

"Bad conscience," he acknowledged. "I've been where you have been--Miss

Grimes. I looked over the edge and I jumped. I'd stay where you are, if

I were you."

"Maybe I shall, maybe I shan't," she replied doggedly. "Stella wants to

bring a boy around to see me. 'You bring him,' I said. 'I'll talk to

him.' Then she got a little confused. Stella's kind, in her way. She came

back after Mr. Martin had gone down the passage. 'See here, kid,' she

said, 'you know as well as I do I can't bring any one round to see you

while you are sitting around in those rags. Let me lend you--' Well, I

stopped her short at that. 'My own plumes or none at all,' I told

her, 'and I'd just as soon he didn't come, anyway.'"

"You're a queer girl," Philip exclaimed. "Where's your father to-day?"

"Usual place," she answered,--"in bed. He never gets up till five."

"Let me order lunch up here for both of us, from the restaurant," he

suggested.

She shook her head.

"No, thanks!"

"Why not?" he persisted.

"I'm going round to the office to see if I can get any extra work."

"But you've got to lunch some time," he persisted.

She laughed a little hardly.

"Have I? We girls haven't got to eat like you men. I'll call up towards

the evening and see if you've anything ready for me."

She was gone before he could stop her. He turned back to his desk and

seated himself. The sight of his last finished sentence presented itself

suddenly in a new light. There was a suggestiveness about it which was

almost poignant. He took up his pen and began to write rapidly.

CHAPTER IV

It was a few minutes after six that evening when Philip was conscious of

a knock at his door. He swung around in his chair, blinking a little.

"Come in!"

Martha Grimes entered. She was in outdoor apparel, that is to say she

wore her hat and a long mackintosh. She remained standing upon the

threshold.

"Just looked up to see if you've got any more work ready," she explained.

He sprang to his feet and stood there, for a moment, unsteadily.

"Come in and shut the door," he ordered. "Look! Look!" he added, pointing

to his table. "Thirty-three sheets! I've been working all the time. I've

been living, I tell you, living God knows where!--not in this accursed

little world. Here, let's pick up the sheets. There's enough work for

you."

She looked at him curiously.

"Have you been in that chair ever since?" she asked.

"Ever since," he assented enthusiastically.

"Any lunch?"

"Not a scrap. Never thought about it."

"You'll make yourself sick, that's what you'll do," she declared. "Go out

and get something at once."

"Never even thought about lunch," he repeated, half to himself. "Where

have you been?"

"Some luck," she replied. "First place I dropped in at. Found there was a

girl gone home for the day, fainted. Lots of work to do, so they just

stuck me down in her chair. Three dollars they gave me. The girl's coming

back to-morrow, though, worse luck."

"When did you have your lunch?"

"Haven't had any. I'm going to make myself a cup of tea now."

He reached for his hat.

"Not on your life" he exclaimed. "Come along, Miss Martha Grimes. I

have written lines--you just wait till you type them! I tell you it's

what I have had at the back of my head for months. It's there now on

paper--living, flaring words. Come along."

"Where to?"

"We are going to eat," he insisted. "I am faint, and so are you. We are

going to that same place, and we'll have lunch and dinner in one."

"Nothing doing," she snapped. "You'll see some more people who recognise

you."

He waved his hand contemptuously.

"Who cares! If you don't come along with me, I'll go up town to the

Waldorf or the Ritz Carlton. I'll waste my money and advertise myself.

Come along--that same little quiet corner. I don't suppose your friends

will be there again."

"Stella won't," she admitted doubtfully. "She's going to Sherry's. I'd

just as soon be out," she went on ruminatingly. "Shouldn't be surprised

if she didn't bring that guy in, after all."

He had already rung the bell of the lift.

"Look at me!" she exclaimed ironically. "Nice sort of an object I am to

take out! Got a raincoat on--though it's dry enough--because my coat's

gone at the seams."

"If you don't stop talking like that," he declared, "I'll march into one

of those great stores and order everything a woman wants to wear. Look at

me. Did you ever see such clothes!"

"A man's different," she protested. "Besides, you've got a way with you

of looking as though you could wear better clothes if you wanted

to--something superior. I don't like it. I should like you better if you

were common."

"You're going to like me better," he assured her, "because we are going

to have a cocktail together within the next three minutes. Look at

you--pale as you can stick. I bet you haven't had a mouthful of food all

day. Neither have I, except a slice of bread and butter with my tea this

morning. We're a nice sort of couple to talk about clothes. What we want

is food."

She swayed for a moment and pretended that she tripped. He caught her arm

and steadied her. She jerked it from him.

"Have your own way," she yielded.

They reached the corner of the street, plunged into the surging crowds of

Broadway, passed into the huge restaurant, were once more pounced upon

by a businesslike but slightly patronizing maître d'hôtel, and escorted

to a remote table in a sort of annex of the room. Philip pushed the menu

away.

"Two cocktails--the quickest you ever mixed in your life," he ordered.

"Quicker than that, mind."

The man was back again almost at once with two frosted glasses upon a

tray. They laughed together almost like children as they set them down

empty.

"I know what I want, and you, too, by the look of you," he continued--"a

beefsteak, with some more of that green corn you gave me the other day,

and fried potatoes, and Burgundy. We'll have some oysters first while we

wait."

She sighed.

"I don't mean to come here with you again," she said, a little

impatiently. "I don't know why I give in to you. You're not strong, you

know. You are a weak man. Women will always look after you; they'll

always help you in trouble--I suppose they'll always care for you. Can't

think why I do what you want me to. Guess I was near starving."

He laughed.

"You don't know much about me yet," he reminded her.

"You don't know much about yourself," she retorted glibly. "Why,

according to your own confession, you only started life a few weeks ago.

I fancy what went before didn't count for much. You've been fretted and

tied up somewhere. You haven't had the chance of getting big like so many

of our American men. What are you going to do with this play of yours?"

"Miss Elizabeth Dalstan has promised to produce it," he told her.

She looked at him in some surprise.

"Elizabeth Dalstan?" she repeated. "Why, she's one of our best

actresses."

"I understood so," he replied. "She has heard the story--in fact I wrote

out one of the scenes with her. She is going to produce it as soon as

it's finished."

"Well, all you poor idiots who write things have some fine tale to tell

their typewriter," she remarked. "You seem as though you mean it, though.

Where did you meet Elizabeth Dalstan?"

"I came over with her on the _Elletania_," he answered thoughtlessly.

She gave a little start. Then she turned upon him almost in anger.

"Well, of all the simpletons!" she exclaimed. "So that's the way you give

yourself away, is it? Just here from Jamaica, eh! Nothing to do with

Douglas Romilly! Never heard of the _Elletania_, did you! I'd like to see

you on the grid at police headquarters for five minutes, with one of our

men asking you a few friendly questions! You'd look well, you would! You

ought to go about with a nurse!"

Philip had all the appearance of a guilty child.

"You see," he explained penitently, "I am new to this sort of thing.

However, you know now."

"Still ready to swear that you're not Douglas Romilly, I suppose?"

"On my honour I am not," he replied.

"Kind of funny that you should have been on the steamer, after all," she

jeered.

"Perhaps so, but I am not Douglas Romilly," he persisted.

She was silent for a moment, then she shrugged her shoulders.

"What do I care who your are?" she said. "Here, help me off with this

raincoat, please. It's warm in here, thank goodness!"

He looked at her as she sat by his side in her plain black dress, and was

impressed for the first time with a certain unsuspected grace of outline,

which made him for the moment oblivious of the shabbiness of her gown.

"You have rather a nice figure," he told her with a sudden impulse of

ingenuousness.

She turned upon him almost furiously. Something in his expression,

however, seemed to disarm her. She closed her lips again.

"You are nothing but a child!" she declared. "You don't mean anything.

I'd be a fool to be angry with you."

The waiter brought their steak. Philip was conscious of something in his

companion's eyes which almost horrified him. It was just that gleam of

hungry desire which has starvation for its background.

"Don't let's talk," he pleaded. "There isn't any conversation in the

world as good as this."

The waiter served them and withdrew, casting a curious glance behind.

They were, from his point of view, a strange couple, for, cosmopolitan

though the restaurant was, money was plentiful in the neighbourhood, and

clients as shabby as these two seldom presented themselves. He pointed

them out to a maître d'hôtel, who in his turn whispered a few words

concerning them to a dark, lantern-jawed man, with keen eyes and a hard

mouth, who was dining by himself. The latter glanced at them and

nodded.

"Thank you, Charles," he said, "I've had my eye on them. The girl's a

pauper, daughter of that old fool Grimes, the actor. Does a little

typewriting--precious little, I should think, from the look of her. The

man's interesting. Don't talk about them. Understand?"

The maître d'hôtel bowed.

"I understand, Inspector. Not much any one can tell you, sir."

"Pays his bill in American money, I suppose?" the diner asked.

"I'll ascertain for you, Mr. Dane," Charles replied. "I believe he is an

Englishman."

"Name of Merton Ware," the inspector agreed, nodding, "just arrived from

Jamaica. Writes some sort of stuff which the girl with him typewrites.

That's his story. He's probably as harmless as a baby."

Charles bowed and moved away. His smile was inscrutable.

CHAPTER V

New York became a changed city to Philip. Its roar and its turmoil, its

babel of tongues speaking to him always in some alien language, were

suddenly hushed! He was no longer conscious of the hard unconcern of a

million faces, of the crude buildings in the streets, the cutting winds,

the curious, depressing sense of being on a desert island, the hermit

clutching at the sleeves of imaginary multitudes. A few minutes' journey

in a cable car which seemed to crawl, a few minutes' swift walking along

the broad thoroughfare of Fifth Avenue, where his feet seemed to fall

upon the air and the passersby seemed to smile upon him like real human

beings, and he was in her room. It was only an hotel sitting room, after

all, but eloquent of her, a sitting room filled with great bowls of

roses, with comfortable easy-chairs, furniture of rose-coloured satin,

white walls, and an English fire upon the grate. Elizabeth was in New

York, and the world moved differently.

She came out to him from an inner room almost at once. His eyes swept

over her feverishly. He almost held his breath. Then he gave a great sigh

of satisfaction. She came with her hands outstretched, a welcoming smile

upon her lips. She was just as he had expected to find her. There was

nothing in her manner to indicate that they had not parted yesterday.

"Welcome to New York, my dramatist!" she exclaimed. "I am here, you see,

to the day, almost to the hour."

He stood there, holding her hands. His eyes seemed to be devouring her.

"Go on talking to me," he begged. "Let me hear you speak. You can't

think--you can't imagine how often in the middle of the night, I have

waked up and thought of you, and the cold shivers have come because,

after all, I fancied that you must be a dream, that you didn't really

exist, that that voyage had never existed. Go on talking."

"You foolish person!" she laughed, patting his hands affectionately. "But

then, of course, you are a little overwrought. I am very real, I can

assure you. I have been in Chicago, playing, but there hasn't been a

night when I haven't thought of the times when we used to talk together

in the darkness, when you let me into your life, and I made up my mind to

try and help you. Foolish person! Sit down in that great easy-chair and

draw it up to the fire."

He sank into it with a little sigh of content. She threw herself on to

the couch opposite to him. Her hands drooped down a little wearily on

either side, her head was thrown back. Against the background of

rose-silk cushions, her cheeks seemed unexpectedly pale.

"I am tired with travelling," she murmured, "and I hate Chicago, and I

have worried about you. Day by day I have read the papers. Everything has

gone well?"

"So far as I know," he answered. "I did exactly as we planned--or rather

as you planned. The papers have been full of the disappearance of

Douglas Romilly. You read how wonderfully it has all turned out? Fate has

provided him with a real reason for disappearing. It seems that the

business was bankrupt."

"You mustn't forget, though," she reminded him, "that that also supplies

a considerable motive for tracking him down. He is supposed to have at

least twenty thousand pounds with him."

"I have all the papers," he went on. "They prove that he knew the state

the business was in. They prove that he really intended to disappear in

New York. The money stands to the credit of Merton Ware--and another at a

bank with which his firm apparently had had no connections, a small bank

in Wall Street."

"So that," she remarked, "is where you get your pseudonym from?"

"It makes the identification so easy," he pointed out, "and no one knew

of it except he. I could easily get a witness presently to prove that I

am Merton Ware."

"You haven't drawn the money yet, then?"

"I haven't been near the bank," he replied. "I still have over a thousand

dollars--money he had with him. Sometimes I think that if I could I'd

like to leave that twenty thousand pounds where it is. I should like some

day, if I could do so without suspicion, to let the creditors of the firm

have it back again. What do you think?"

She nodded.

"I would rather you didn't touch it yourself," she agreed. "I think

you'll find, too, that you'll be able to earn quite enough without

wanting it. Nothing disturbing has happened to you at all, then?"

"Once I had a fright," he told her. "I was in a restaurant close to my

hotel. I was there with a young woman who is typing the play for me."

She looked towards him incredulously.

"You were there with a typewriter?" she exclaimed.

"I suppose it seems queer," he admitted. "It didn't to me. She is a

plain, shabby, half starved little thing, fighting her own battle

bravely. She came to me for work--she lives in the flat below--and

it seemed to me that she was just as hungry for a kind word as I was

lonely, and I took her out with me. Twice I have taken her. Her name is

Miss Grimes."

"I am not in the least sure that I approve," she said, "but go on."

"A friend of hers came into the restaurant, a girl in the chorus of a

musical comedy here, and she had with her a young man. I recognised him

at once. We didn't come across one another much, but he was on the

steamer."

Elizabeth's face was full of concern.

"Go on."

"He asked me twice if I wasn't Mr. Romilly. I assured him that he was

mistaken. I don't think I gave myself away. The next day he went to see

the girl I was with, Martha Grimes."

"Well, what did she tell him?"

"She told him that she had been typing my work for over a month, that I

had come from Jamaica, and that my name was Merton Ware."

Elizabeth gazed into the fire for several moments, and Philip watched

her. It was a woman's face, grave and thoughtful, a little perturbed just

then, as though by some unwelcome thought. Presently she looked back at

him, looked into his eyes long and earnestly.

"My friend," she said, "you are like no one else on earth. Perhaps you

are one of those horrible people who have what they call an unholy

influence over my sex. You have known this girl for a matter of a few

days, and she lies for you. And there's five hundred dollars reward. I

suppose she knew about that?"

"Yes, she knew," he admitted. "She simply isn't that sort. I suppose I

realised that, or I shouldn't have been kind to her."

"It's a puzzle," she went on. "I think there must be something in you of

the weakling, you know, something that appeals to the mothering instinct

in women. I know that my first feeling for you was that I wanted to help

you. Tell me what you think of yourself, Mr. Philip Merton Ware? Are you

a faithful person? Are you conscientious? Have you a heart, I wonder? How

much of the man is there underneath that strong frame of yours? Are you

going to take just the things that are given you in life, and make no

return? For the moment, you see, I am forgetting that you are my friend

and that I like you. I am thinking of you from the point of view of an

actress--as a psychical problem. Philip, you idiot!" she broke off,

suddenly stamping her foot, "don't sit there looking at me with your

great eyes. Tell me you are glad I've come back. Tell me you feel

something, for goodness' sake!"

He was on his knees before she could check him, his arms, his lips

praying for her. She thrust him back.

"It was my fault," she declared, "but don't, please. Yes, of course you

have feelings. I don't know why you tempted me to that little outburst."

"You'll tempt me to more than that," he cried passionately. "Do you think

it's for your help that I've thought of you? Do you think it's because

you're an angel to me, because you've comforted me in my darkest, most

miserable hours that I've dreamed of you and craved for you? There's more

than that in my thoughts, dear. It's because you are you, yourself, that

I've longed for you through the aching hours of the night, that I've sat

and written like a man beside himself just for the joy of thinking that

the words I wrote would be spoken by you. Oh! if you want me to tell you

what I feel--"

She suddenly leaned forward, took his head between her hands and kissed

his forehead.

"Now get back, please, to your chair," she begged. "You've stilled the

horrible, miserable little doubt that was tearing at my heartstrings. I

just had it before, once or twice, and then--isn't it foolish!--your

telling me about this little typewriter girl! I must go and see her. We

must be kind to her."

He resumed his seat with a little sigh.

"She thought a great deal more of me and my work when I told her that you

were probably going to act in my play."

Her expression changed. She was more serious, at the same time more

eager.

"Ah! The play!" she exclaimed. "I can see that you have brought some of

it."

He drew the roll of manuscript from his pocket.

"Shall I read it?" he suggested.

She almost snatched it away. "No! I can't wait for that. Give it to me,

quickly."

She leaned forward so that the firelight fell upon the pages. Little

strands of soft brown hair drooped over her face. In studying her, Philip

almost forgot his own anxiety. He had known so few women, yet he had

watched so many from afar off, endowed them with their natural qualities,

built up their lives and tastes for them, and found them all so sadly

wanting. To him, Elizabeth represented everything that was desirable in

her sex, from the flowing lines of her beautiful body to the sympathy

which seemed to be always shining out of her eyes. Notwithstanding her

strength, she was so exquisitely and entirely feminine, a creature of

silk and laces, free from any effort of provocativeness, yet subtly,

almost clamorously human. He forgot, in those few moments, that she had

become the arbitress of his material fate--that he was a humble author,

watching the effect of his first attempts upon a mistress in her

profession. He remembered only that she was the woman who was filling his

life, stealing into every corner of it, permeating him with love,

pointing him onwards towards a life indescribable, unrealisable....

She swung suddenly towards him. There was a certain amount of enthusiasm

in her face but even more marked was her relief.

"Oh! I am so glad," she cried. "You know, I have had qualms. When you

told me the story in your own words, picking your language so carefully,

and building it all up before me, well, you know what I said. I gave you

more than hope--I promised you success. And then, when I got away into

the hard, stagey world of Chicago, and my manager talked business to me,

and my last playwright preached of technique, I began to wonder whether,

after all, you could bring your ideas together like this, whether you

would have a sense of perspective--you know what I mean, don't you? And

you have it, and the play is going to be wonderful, and I shall produce

it. Why don't you look pleased, Mr. Author? You are going to be famous."

He smiled.

"I don't care about fame," he said. "And for the rest, I think I knew."

"Conceited!" she exclaimed.

"It wasn't that," he protested. "It was simply when I sat down in that

little room, high up over the roofs and buildings of a strange city, shut

myself in and told myself that it was for you--well, the thoughts came

too easily. They tumbled over one another. And when I looked away from my

work, I saw the people moving around me, and I knew that I had made my

dreams real, and that's the great thing, isn't it?... Elizabeth!"

"Well?"

"I am lonely in that little room."

"You lonely, taking out typewriters to dine!" she mocked tenderly.

"It is lonely," he repeated, "and I am afraid of you here in all this

luxury. I am so far away. I come from my attic to this, and I am afraid.

Do you know why?"

She sat quite still for a moment. Dimly she felt the presage of a coming

change in their relations. Up to now she had been the mistress, she had

held him so easily in check with her practised skill, with an unfinished

sentence, a look, a touch. And now the man was rising up in him, and she

felt her powers weaken.

"Shall I change my abode?" she murmured.

"Ah! but you would be just as wonderful and as far away even if we

changed places--if you sat in my attic and I took your place here. That

isn't why I torture myself, why I am always asking myself if you are

real, if the things we talk about are real, if the things we feel belong

to ourselves, well up from our own hearts for one another or are just the

secondary emotions of other people we catch up without knowing why. This

is foolish, but you understand--you do understand. It is because you

keep me so far away from yourself, when my fingers are burning for yours,

when even to touch your face, to feel your cheek against mine, would

banish every fear I have ever had. Elizabeth, you do understand! I have

never kissed you, I have never held you for one moment in my arms--and I

love you!"

He was leaning over her chair and she held him tightly by the shoulders.

There was nothing left of that hidden fear in his dark eyes. They shone

now with another light, and she began to tremble.

"I wanted to wait a little, Philip, but if you feel like that--well, I

can't."

He took her silently into his arms. With the half closing of her eyes,

the first touch of her responsive lips, himself dimly conscious of the

change, he passed into the world where stronger men live.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

Three months later, a very different Philip stood in the smaller of a

handsome suite of reception rooms in a fashionable Fifth Avenue hotel. He

was wearing evening clothes of the most approved cut and carried himself

with a dignity and assurance entirely transforming. The distinction of

birth and breeding, little apparent in those half-starved, passionate

days of his misery, had come easily to the surface. His shoulders, too,

seemed to have broadened, and his face had lost its cadaverous pallor.

The apartment in which he stood was plainly but handsomely furnished as a

small withdrawing room. On the oak chiffonier stood a silver tray on

which were half a dozen frosted cocktails. Through the curtains was

apparent a room beyond, in which a round table, smothered with flowers,

was arranged for supper; in the distance, from the public restaurant,

came the sound of softly played music. Philip glanced at the clock. The

whole of the anxieties of this momentous evening had passed. Telephone

messages had reached him every quarter of an hour. The play was a great

success. Elizabeth was coming to him with her producer and a few

theatrical friends, flushed with triumph. They were all to meet for the

first time that night the man who for the last three months had lived as

a hermit--Merton Ware, the author of "The House of Shams," the new-found

dramatist.

A maître d'hôtel appeared in the space between the two rooms, and bowed.

"Everything is quite ready, Mr. Ware," he said, in the friendly yet

deferential manner of an American head-waiter. "Won't you take a

cocktail, sir, while you are waiting?"

"Very thoughtful of you, Louis. I think I will," Philip assented, taking

a little case from his pocket and lighting a cigarette.

The man passed him a glass upon a small salver.

"You'll pardon the liberty, I am sure, sir," he continued, dropping his

voice a little. "I've just heard that 'The House of Shams' seems to be a

huge success, sir. If I might take the liberty of offering my

congratulations!"

Philip smiled genially.

"You are the first, Louis," he said. "Thank you very much indeed."

"I think you will find the supper everything that could be desired, Mr.

Ware," the man went on. "Our head chef, Monsieur Raconnot, has given it

his personal attention. The wine will be slightly iced, as you desired. I

shall be outside in the corridor to announce the guests."

"Capital, Louis!" Ware replied, sipping his cocktail. "It will be another

quarter of an hour yet before we see anything of them, I am afraid."

The man disappeared and left Philip once more alone. He looked through

the walls of the room as though, indeed, he could see into the packed

theatre and could hear the cries for "Author!" which even then were

echoing through the house. From the moment when Elizabeth, abandoning her

reserve, had given him the love he craved, a new strength seemed to have

shone out of the man. Step by step he had thought out subtly and with

infinite care every small detail of his life. It was he who had elected

to live those three months in absolute seclusion. It was he, indirectly,

who had arranged that many more photographs of Douglas Romilly, the

English shoe manufacturer, should appear in the newspapers. One moment's

horror he had certainly had. He could see the little paragraph now,

almost lost in the shoals of more important news:

GHASTLY DISCOVERY IN A DERBYSHIRE CANAL

Yesterday the police recovered the body of a man

who had apparently been dead for some weeks, from

a canal close to Detton Magna. The body was

unrecognisable but it is believed that the remains

are those of Mr. Philip Romilly, the missing art

teacher from London, who is alleged to have

committed suicide in January last.

The thought of that gruesome find scarcely blanched his cheeks. His

nerves now were stronger and tenser things. He crushed back those

memories with all the strength of his will. Whatever might lie behind, he

had struck for the future which he meant to live and enjoy. They were

only weaklings who brooded over an unalterable past. It was for the

present and the near future that he lived, and both, in that moment, were

more alluring than ever before. Even his intellectual powers seemed to

have developed in his new-found happiness. The play which he had written,

every line of which appeared to gain in vital and literary force towards

its conclusion, was only the first of his children. Already other images

and ideas were flowing into his brain. The power of creation was

triumphantly throwing out its tendrils. He was filled with an amazing and

almost inspired confidence. He was ready to start upon fresh work that

hour, to-morrow, or when he chose. And before him now was the prospect of

stimulating companionship. Elizabeth and he had decided that the time had

come for him to take his fate into his hands. He was to be introduced to

the magnates of the dramatic profession, to become a clubman in the

world's most hospitable city, to mix freely in the circles where he would

find himself in constant association with the keenest brains and most

brilliant men of letters in the world. He was safe. They had both decided

it.

He walked to the mirror and looked at himself. The nervous,

highly-strung, half-starved, neurotic stripling had become the perfectly

assured, well-mannered, and well-dressed man of the world. He had studied

various details with a peculiar care, suffered a barber to take summary

measures with his overlong black hair, had accustomed himself to the use

of an eyeglass, which hung around his neck by a thin, black ribbon. Men

might talk of likenesses, men who were close students of their fellows,

yet there was no living person who could point to him and say--"You are,

beyond a shadow of doubt, a man with whom I travelled on the

_Elletania_." The thing was impossible.

Louis once more made a noiseless appearance. There was the slightest of

frowns upon his face.

"A gentleman wishes a word with you before the arrival of your guests,

Mr. Ware," he announced.

"A journalist?" Philip enquired carelessly.

"I do not think so, sir."

Even as he spoke the door was opened and closed again. The man who

had entered bowed slightly to Philip. He was tall and clean-shaven,

self-assured, and with manner almost significantly reserved. He held a

bowler hat in his hand and glanced towards Louis. He had the air of

being somewhat out of place in so fashionable a rendezvous.

"Good evening, Mr. Ware!" he began. "Could I have just a word with you?"

Philip nodded to Louis, who at once left the room. The newcomer drew a

little nearer.

"My name, sir," he said, "is Dane--Edward Dane."

Philip bowed politely. He was just a little annoyed at the intrusion, an

annoyance which he failed altogether to conceal.

"What do you want with me?" he asked. "I am expecting some friends to

supper in about ten minutes."

"Ten minutes will perhaps be sufficient for what I have to say," the

other promised. "You don't know me, then, Mr. Ware?"

"Never saw you before, to the best of my knowledge," Philip replied

nonchalantly. "Are you a journalist?"

The man laid his hat upon a corner of the table.

"I am a detective," he said, "attached to the Cherry Street headquarters.

Your last rooms, Mr. Ware, were in my beat."

Philip nodded with some slight indication of interest. He faced his

ordeal with the courage of a man of steel.

"That so?" he remarked indifferently. "Well, Mr. Dane, I have heard a

good deal about you American detectives. Pleased to meet you. What can I

do for you?"

The detective eyed Philip steadfastly. There was just the shadow of

something that looked like admiration in his hard, grey eyes.

"Well, Mr. Ware," he said, "nothing that need disturb your supper party,

I am sure. Over in this country we sometimes do things in an unusual

way. That's why I am paying you this visit. I have been watching you for

exactly three months and fourteen days."

"Watching me?" Philip repeated.

"Precisely! No idea why, I suppose?"

"Not the slightest."

The detective glanced towards the clock. Barely two minutes had passed.

"Well," he explained, "I got on your tracks quick enough when you skipped

from the Waldorf and blossomed out in a second-rate tenement house as

Merton Ware."

"So I was at the Waldorf, was I?" Philip murmured.

"You crossed from Liverpool on the _Elletania_," the man continued,

"registered at the Waldorf as Mr. Douglas Romilly of the Douglas Romilly

Shoe Company, went to your room, changed your clothes, and disappeared.

Of course, a disappearance of that sort," he went on tolerantly, "might

be possible in London. In New York, to even attempt it is farcical."

"Dear me," remarked Philip, "this is very interesting. Let me ask you

this question, though. If you were so sure of your facts, why didn't you

arrest me at once instead of just watching me?"

The man's eyes were like gimlets. He seemed as though he were trying,

with curious and professional intensity, to read the thoughts in Philip's

brain.

"There is no criminal charge against Douglas Romilly that I know of," he

said.

"There's a considerable reward offered for his discovery," Philip

reminded him.

"I can claim that at any moment," the man replied. "I have had my reasons

for waiting. It's partly those reasons that have brought me here. For one

thing, Mr. Douglas Romilly was supposed to be able to put his hand on a

matter of a hundred thousand dollars somewhere in New York. You haven't

shown many signs up till now, Mr. Ware, of having any such sum in your

possession."

"I see," Philip assented. "You wanted the money as well."

"The creditors of the Douglas Romilly Shoe Company are wanting it pretty

badly," the man proceeded, "but that wasn't all. I wanted to find out

what your game was. That I don't know, even now. That is why I have come

to you. Have I the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Douglas Romilly?"

"I really don't see," Philip protested thoughtfully, "why I should go

into partnership with you in this affair. You see, in the long run, our

interests might not be altogether identical."

Mr. Dane smiled grimly.

"That's a fairly shrewd calculation, Mr. Ware," he admitted. "You ain't

bound to answer any question you don't want to. This is just a friendly

chat and no more."

"Besides," Philip continued, lighting another cigarette, "I think I

understood you to say that you had already arrived at the conclusion that

I was Douglas Romilly?"

"Not precisely that," the detective replied. "All that I discovered was

that you were the man who registered at the Waldorf Hotel as Mr. Douglas

Romilly."

"Well, the only name I choose to acknowledge at present is the name of

Merton Ware," Philip declared. "If you think there is any mystery about

me, any connection with the gentleman whom I believe you call Mr. Douglas

Romilly, well, the matter is one for your investigation. You will forgive

me if I remind you that my guests will be here in a matter of a few

minutes, and permit me to ask you one more question. Why do you come here

to me in this very unofficial manner? If I am really an impostor, you are

giving me every opportunity of clearing out."

Mr. Edward Dane shook his head. He was fingering the brim of his hat.

"Oh, no, Mr. Ware!" he declared smoothly. "Our detective system may have

some faults, but when a man's name is put on the list where yours

figures, he has not one chance in a million of leaving the country or of

gaining any place of hiding. I shall know where you lunch to-morrow and

with whom you dine, and with whom you spend your time. The law, sir, will

keep its eye upon you."

"Really, that seems very friendly," Philip said coolly. "Shall I have the

privilege of your personal surveillance?"

"I think not, Mr. Ware. To tell you the truth, this is rather a p.p.c.

visit. I've booked my passage on the _Elletania_, sailing to-morrow from

New York. I am taking a trip over to England to make a few enquiries

round about the spot where this Mr. Douglas Romilly hails from--Detton

Magna, isn't it?"

Philip made no reply, yet even his silence might well have been the

silence of indifference.

"At the last moment," the detective concluded, "it flashed in upon me

that there might be some ridiculous explanation of the few little points

about your case which, I must confess, have puzzled me. For that reason,

I decided to seek an interview with you before I left. You have, however,

I gather, nothing to say to me?"

"Nothing at all, Mr. Dane, except to wish you a pleasant voyage," Philip

declared. "I won't detain you a moment longer. I hear my guests in the

corridor. Good night, sir!" he added, opening the door. "I appreciate

your call very much. Come and see me again when you return from England."

Mr. Dane lingered for a moment upon the threshold, hat in hand, a

somewhat ominous figure. There was no attempt at a handshake between the

two men. The detective was imperturbable. Philip, listening to

Elizabeth's voice, had shown his first sign of impatience.

"I shall surely do that, Mr. Ware!" the other promised, as he passed out.

The door closed. Philip stood for a moment in the empty room, listening

to the man's retreating footsteps. Then he turned slowly around. His

cheeks were blanched, his eyes were glazed with reminiscent horror. He

looked through the wall of the room--a long way back.

"We shall find Mr. Ware in here, I expect." He could hear the voices of

his approaching guests.

He ground his heel into the carpet and swung around. He anticipated

Louis, threw open the curtain, and stood there waiting to welcome his

guests, a smile upon his lips, his hands outstretched towards Elizabeth.