I could not walk about the streets with Lucy. She is a pretty
girl, but she looked odd enough in her country clothes. Suddenly it
struck me that I might take her into the country, to Wimbledon."

"And you took her there and heard Evelyn Innes sing. And what did Lucy
think? A very pretty experiment in experimental psychology."

"The voice is getting thinner. She sang Stradella's Chanson D'Eglise,
and Lucy could hardly speak when we came out of church. 'Oh, what a
wonderful voice,' she said, 'do you think she regrets?' 'Whatever we do
we regret,' I answered, not because I thought the observation original,
but because it seemed suitable to the occasion; 'and we regret still
more what we don't do.' And I asked myself if I should write to Lucy's
people as we walked about the Common. But Lucy wanted to hear about
Owen Asher and Evelyn, and the operas she had sung, and I told the
story of Tannhauser and Tristan. She had never heard such stories
before, and, as we got up from the warm grass, she said that she could
imagine Evelyn standing in the nuns' garden with her eyes fixed on the
calm skies, getting courage from them to persevere. Wasn't it clever of
her? We dined together in a small restaurant and I spent the evening
with her in the lodging-house; the landlady let us her sitting-room.
Lucy is charming, and her happiness is volatile and her melancholy too;
she's persuasive and insinuating as a perfume; and when I left the
house, it was as if I had come out of a moonlight garden. 'Thy green
eyes look upon me... I love the moonlight of thine eyes.'"

"Go on," said Rodney, "what happened after that?"

"The most disagreeable thing that ever happened to me in my life. You
don't know what it is to be really afraid. I didn't until a fellow came
up to me at the club and asked me if I had seen the detectives. Fear is
a terrible thing, Rodney; there is nothing so demoralising as fear. You
know my staid old club of black mahogany and low ceilings, where half a
dozen men sit dining and talking about hunting and two-year-olds. There
is a man in that club who has asked me for the last ten years what I am
going to do with my two-year-olds. He cannot remember that I never had
a two-year-old. But that night he wasn't tipsy, and his sobriety
impressed me; he sat down at my table, and after a while he leaned
across and asked me if I knew that two detectives had been asking after
me. 'You had better look to this. These things turn out devi