ghastly laughter was forcing its way up in his throat. Was
everyone talking of the murder he had committed? Even the very
scarecrows?

III

There are some natures so constituted that, due to be hung at ten
o'clock, they will play chess at eight. Such men invariably rise. They
make especially good bishops, editors, judges, impresarios, Prime
ministers, money-lenders, and generals; in fact, fill with exceptional
credit any position of power over their fellow-men. They have spiritual
cold storage, in which are preserved their nervous systems. In such men
there is little or none of that fluid sense and continuity of feeling
known under those vague terms, speculation, poetry, philosophy. Men of
facts and of decision switching imagination on and off at will,
subordinating sentiment to reason... one does not think of them when
watching wind ripple over cornfields, or swallows flying.

Keith Darrant had need for being of that breed during his dinner at the
Tellassons. It was just eleven when he issued from the big house in
Portland Place and refrained from taking a cab. He wanted to walk that
he might better think. What crude and wanton irony there was in his
situation! To have been made father-confessor to a murderer, he--well on
towards a judgeship! With his contempt for the kind of weakness which
landed men in such abysses, he felt it all so sordid, so "impossible,"
that he could hardly bring his mind to bear on it at all. And yet he
must, because of two powerful instincts--self-preservation and
blood-loyalty.

The wind had still the sapping softness of the afternoon, but rain had
held off so far. It was warm, and he unbuttoned his fur overcoat. The
nature of his thoughts deepened the dark austerity of his face, whose
thin, well-cut lips were always pressing together, as if, by meeting, to
dispose of each thought as it came up. He moved along the crowded
pavements glumly. That air of festive conspiracy which drops with the
darkness on to lighted streets, galled him. He turned off on a darker
route.

This ghastly business! Convinced of its reality, he yet could not see
it. The thing existed in his mind, not as a picture, but as a piece of
irrefutable evidence. Larry had not meant to do it, of course. But it
was murder, all the same. Men like Larry--weak, impulsive, sentimental,
introspective creatures--did they ever mean what they did? This man,
this Walenn, was, by all accounts, better dea