, like a person facing
you, who answers your questions with an absent eye. Half-past six, and
he was due from the Continent every moment. His lamp--green-shaded
because his vision was weak from over-work--some soda water and a spirit
stand were awaiting him on the table, and a small mass of letters and
papers was congregated in front of his chair. All these were tones in
the gamut of expectation that found its keynote in myself.

We had been "inseparables" before his going, and we would be so never
again I felt convinced. She had absorbed him: mind, desire, future were
packed in the little palm of her hand. Yet I was not vulgarly jealous. I
loved Aubrey Yeldham better than I could have loved a brother, but I had
seen her and had caught the reflection of his sentiment, though in a
tempered degree. I had met her but once, for on the day after our chance
encounter--in a verdurous Devon lane where she had lost her bearings and
we had come to her assistance--I had been summoned to the bedside of a
sick relative in town. Returning to the old haunts, I naturally expected
to resume our fishing expeditions in the picturesque valley of the Exe,
but I soon discovered Yeldham to have found other pellucid purple depths
that interested him superlatively. I had watched the drama from a
distance, and administered cautions with the cool pulse of an umpire.
But he was past redemption. I suspected the truth when I made an
impressionist sketch of her--milky complexion, dead copper chevelure and
pulpy eyelids like some Greuze dreamer--and saw his greedy eyes fixed on
the canvas, not daring to name a price, too delicate to crave a
charitable dole. I learnt more from the attitude of reverence, almost of
awe, wherewith he received the gift from my hands and hurriedly carried
it to his own sanctum, hid it from me, the maker of it, as though to
veil its charms from alien eye. I knew Aubrey Yeldham well, had shared
many of his escapades, and winked apprehensively at others. But here I
was of no use, and decided we had come to the supreme moment of
life--there is always one--when we must let things slide.

Her name was Ruth Lascelles, and she was a widow; that was the sum total
of our knowledge of her. She might have been twenty, but we estimated
her age at twenty-five, deducing our theory from a certain fatigued
languor of voice and expression that accorded ill with the girlish satin
of her skin. This was arrived at on the first day of our meetin