of the
penalties of genius to be compelled to do eccentric things. I must
have my supper alone."

"Or with us," she said. "You know Mr. Thorndyke, don't you? There is
plenty of room here."

CHAPTER II

Matravers stood at an open window, reading a note by the grey dawn
light. Below him stretched the broad thoroughfare of Piccadilly,
noiseless, shadowy, deserted. He had thrown up the window overcome by
a sudden sense of suffocation, and a chill, damp breeze came stealing
in, cooling his parched forehead and hot, dry eyes. For the last two
or three hours he had been working with an unwonted and rare zest; it
had happened quite by chance, for as a rule he was a man of regular,
even mechanical habits. But to-night he scarcely knew himself,--he
had all the sensations of a man who had passed through a new and
altogether unexpected experience. At midnight he had let himself into
his room after that swift, impulsive departure from the Milan, and
had dropped by chance into the chair before his writing-table. The
sight of his last unfinished sentence, abruptly abandoned in the
centre of a neatly written page of manuscript, had fascinated him, and
as he sat there idly with the loose sheet in his hands, holding it so
that the lamplight might fall upon its very legible characters, an
idea flashed into his brain,--an idea which had persistently eluded
him for days. With the sudden stimulus of a purely mental activity, he
had hastily thrown aside his outdoor garment, and had written for
several hours with a readiness and facility which seemed, somehow, for
the last few days to have been denied to him.

He had become his old self again,--the events of the evening lay
already far behind. Then had come a soft knocking at the door,
followed by the apologetic entrance of his servant bearing a note upon
which his name was written in hasty characters with an "Immediate"
scrawled, as though by an after-thought, upon the left-hand corner. He
had torn it open wondering at the woman's writing, and glanced at its
brief contents carelessly enough,--but since then he had done no work.
For the present he was not likely to do any more.

The cold breeze, acting like a tonic upon his dazed senses, awoke in
him also a peculiar restlessness, a feeling of intolerable restraint
at the close environment of his little room and its associations. Its
atmosphere had suddenly become stifling. He caught up his cloak and
hat, and walked out again int