of
its own, and even a suggestive voice? He could not inform her that a man
may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face till the wildest
expedient to get rid of it appears a child of wisdom.

On this mental reference to a First Secretary of a great Embassy, Mr
Verloc stopped in the doorway, and looking down into the kitchen with an
angry face and clenched fists, addressed his wife.

"You don't know what a brute I had to deal with."

He started off to make another perambulation of the table; then when he
had come to the door again he stopped, glaring in from the height of two
steps.

"A silly, jeering, dangerous brute, with no more sense than--After all
these years! A man like me! And I have been playing my head at that
game. You didn't know. Quite right, too. What was the good of telling
you that I stood the risk of having a knife stuck into me any time these
seven years we've been married? I am not a chap to worry a woman that's
fond of me. You had no business to know." Mr Verloc took another turn
round the parlour, fuming.

"A venomous beast," he began again from the doorway. "Drive me out into
a ditch to starve for a joke. I could see he thought it was a damned
good joke. A man like me! Look here! Some of the highest in the world
got to thank me for walking on their two legs to this day. That's the
man you've got married to, my girl!"

He perceived that his wife had sat up. Mrs Verloc's arms remained lying
stretched on the table. Mr Verloc watched at her back as if he could
read there the effect of his words.

"There isn't a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I hadn't my
finger in at the risk of my life. There's scores of these revolutionists
I've sent off, with their bombs in their blamed pockets, to get
themselves caught on the frontier. The old Baron knew what I was worth
to his country. And here suddenly a swine comes along--an ignorant,
overbearing swine."

Mr Verloc, stepping slowly down two steps, entered the kitchen, took a
tumbler off the dresser, and holding it in his hand, approached the sink,
without looking at his wife. "It wasn't the old Baron who would have had
the wicked folly of getting me to call on him at eleven in the morning.
There are two or three in this town that, if they had seen me going in,
would have made no bones about knocking me on the head sooner or later.
It was a silly, murderous trick to expose for nothing a man--like me."

Mr Verloc