uld demand action from him! It was only a
question of what he was going to advise Larry to do. To keep silent, and
disappear? Had that a chance of success? Perhaps if the answers to
his questions had been correct. But this girl! Suppose the dead man's
relationship to her were ferreted out, could she be relied on not
to endanger Larry? These women were all the same, unstable as water,
emotional, shiftless pests of society. Then, too, a crime untracked,
dogging all his brother's after life; a secret following him wherever he
might vanish to; hanging over him, watching for some drunken moment, to
slip out of his lips. It was bad to think of. A clean breast of it?
But his heart twitched within him. "Brother of Mr. Keith Darrant, the
well-known King's Counsel"--visiting a woman of the town, strangling
with his bare hands the woman's husband! No intention to murder,
but--a dead man! A dead man carried out of the house, laid under a dark
archway! Provocation! Recommended to mercy--penal servitude for life!
Was that the advice he was going to give Larry to-morrow morning?

And he had a sudden vision of shaven men with clay-coloured features,
run, as it were, to seed, as he had seen them once in Pentonville, when
he had gone there to visit a prisoner. Larry! Whom, as a baby creature,
he had watched straddling; whom, as a little fellow, he had fagged; whom
he had seen through scrapes at college; to whom he had lent money time
and again, and time and again admonished in his courses. Larry! Five
years younger than himself; and committed to his charge by their mother
when she died. To become for life one of those men with faces like
diseased plants; with no hair but a bushy stubble; with arrows marked on
their yellow clothes! Larry! One of those men herded like sheep; at the
beck and call of common men! A gentleman, his own brother, to live that
slave's life, to be ordered here and there, year after year, day in,
day out. Something snapped within him. He could not give that advice.
Impossible! But if not, he must make sure of his ground, must verify,
must know. This Glove Lane--this arch way? It would not be far from
where he was that very moment. He looked for someone of whom to make
enquiry. A policeman was standing at the corner, his stolid face
illumined by a lamp; capable and watchful--an excellent officer, no
doubt; but, turning his head away, Keith passed him without a word.
Strange to feel that cold, uneasy feeling in presenc