"Yes, you're the police."
"All right then. The police have recovered it. Take it back to him. How
much do you need? Will a hundred do?"
That was not Cassy's idea. She shook her docked head at it. "You're the
police but I am a business man. If you make the loan, you must keep the
collateral."
"You are a little Jew, that's what you are," Lennox, affecting
annoyance, replied.
Cassy smiled, "I like your jeu d'esprit. But not well enough to accept
money as a gift."
"Good Lord!" Lennox protested. "Look here! I am not giving money away. I
don't mean it as a gift. Pay me back whenever you like. Until then, what
do you expect me to do with that thing? Give serenades? No, take it back
to your father. I know just how he feels about it. He told me."
Cassy shifted the bundle. "Good-bye then." But as he still blocked the
way, she added: "Will you let me pass?"
Moralists maintain that a man should never argue with a woman,
particularly when she is young and good-looking. He should yield, they
assert. Cassy's youth and beauty said nothing audible to Lennox. They
said nothing of which he was then aware. In addition he was not a
moralist. But there are influences, as there are bacilli, which
unconsciously we absorb. For some time he had been absorbing a few. He
did not realise it then. When he did, he was in prison. That though was
later. At the moment he threw up his hands.
"I surrender. Will you mind putting it down somewhere?"
Cassy turned. Beyond was a table and near it a chair to which she went.
There she dumped the violin. In so doing she saw Margaret's picture.
"What a lovely girl!"
Lennox, who had followed, nodded. "That is Miss Austen to whom I am
engaged."
"Oh!" said Cassy. She did not know that Lennox was engaged. But suddenly
the room had become uncomfortably warm and she blurted it: "How happy
she must be!"
At the slip, for he thought it one, Lennox laughed.
"You mean how happy I must be," exclaimed this rare individual to whom
the verb to be happy had a present tense, yet one which even then it was
losing.
He had been fumbling in a pocket. From it he drew a wad of bills, fives
and tens, and made another wad. "Here you are. I will mail you a receipt
for the collateral."
Cassy, taking the money in one hand, extended the other. "May I say
something?"
"Why, of course."
Cassy could talk and very fluently. But at the moment she choked. What
is worse, she flushed. Conscious of which and annoyed at it, she
withdrew her hand and said: "It's so hot here!"
Lennox looked about, then at her. "Is it? Was that what you wanted to
say?"
Cassy shook herself. "No, and it was very rude of me. I wanted to thank
you. Good-bye, Mr. Policeman."
"Good-bye," he threw after the girl, who, in leaving the room, must have
taken the sunlight with her. As she passed over the rug, the puddle
passed too. It followed her out like a dog.
That phenomenon, to which Lennox then attached no significance, he
afterward recalled. For the moment he busied himself with pen and ink.
Presently he touched a button.
From regions beyond the little old man appeared.
Lennox motioned at the bundle. "Take that to this address. Ask for Mr.
Cara and say it comes from the police. From the police, don't forget,
Harris."
"I'll not forget, sir."
"And go now. When the ladies come, I'll open the door."
As it happened, only shadows came. The shadows lengthened. They lapped
the floor, devoured the silver, turned the rug into a pit, the room into
darkness. Apart from shadows, no one came, no one rang. But, though
Lennox was unaware of it, two people did come, and of the two one would
have rung, had not the other prevented.
Lennox did not know that. On the inaccessible planes where events are
marshalled, it was perhaps prearranged that he should not.