eman again; the fellow's round should have taken him
well out of the street by now, and turning the handle cautiously, he
looked out. No one in sight. He stood a moment, wondering if he should
turn to right or left, then briskly crossed the street. A voice to his
right hand said:

"Good-night, sir."

There in the shadow of a doorway the policeman was standing. The fellow
must have seen him coming out! Utterly unable to restrain a start, and
muttering "Goodnight!" Keith walked on rapidly:

He went full quarter of a mile before he lost that startled and uneasy
feeling in sardonic exasperation that he, Keith Darrant, had been taken
for a frequenter of a lady of the town. The whole thing--the whole
thing!--a vile and disgusting business! His very mind felt dirty and
breathless; his spirit, drawn out of sheath, had slowly to slide
back before he could at all focus and readjust his reasoning faculty.
Certainly, he had got the knowledge he wanted. There was less danger
than he thought. That girl's eyes! No mistaking her devotion. She would
not give Larry away. Yes! Larry must clear out--South America--the
East--it did not matter. But he felt no relief. The cheap, tawdry room
had wrapped itself round his fancy with its atmosphere of murky love,
with the feeling it inspired, of emotion caged within those yellowish
walls and the red stuff of its furniture. That girl's face! Devotion;
truth, too, and beauty, rare and moving, in its setting of darkness and
horror, in that nest of vice and of disorder!... The dark archway; the
street arab, with his gleeful: "They 'ain't got 'im yet!"; the feel of
those bare arms round his neck; that whisper of horror in the darkness;
above all, again, her child face looking into his, so truthful! And
suddenly he stood quite still in the street. What in God's name was he
about? What grotesque juggling amongst shadows, what strange and ghastly
eccentricity was all this? The forces of order and routine, all the
actualities of his daily life, marched on him at that moment, and swept
everything before them. It was a dream, a nightmare not real! It was
ridiculous! That he--he should thus be bound up with things so black and
bizarre!

He had come by now to the Strand, that street down which every day he
moved to the Law Courts, to his daily work; his work so dignified and
regular, so irreproachable, and solid. No! The thing was all a monstrous
nightmare! It would go, if he fixed his mind on the familia