Actors and actresses, people you read about in the daily papers, ministers, religious ones—"

    "Goodbye, Sweeny."

    She closed the door on his recital.

    Her knees wobbled as she walked down the stairs, which she took in preference to the lift, for she knew now just how much she had counted upon the interview. With despair in her heart she saw the iron inevitability of everything. What could now arrest the sword already swinging for the blow? Nothing, nothing! The man she wanted she could not reach—the only man, she told herself bitterly, the only man!

    Looking up on the journey back she saw the white farmhouse and could have wept.

    She changed at the junction and arrived at Beverley at five o'clock, and the first person she saw as she stepped off the train was the calm, capable, grey-eyed man. He had seen her first, and his eyes were on hers when she stepped down. For a second her heart stood still, and then she saw at his side the man with the handcuffs on his wrist—the Canadian professor! So that was whom he was after—the Canadian professor, who had talked so entertainingly on fossils.

    Scottie knew a great deal about fossils; it was his favourite subject. In prison, if one takes up a subject, one usually discovers three or four books in the library that have a bearing upon the matter. On Scottie's other side stood a uniformed policeman. As for the criminal, he met her horrified glance with a bland smile. She supposed that people got callous and hardened after a while, and the shame of captivity ceased to be. But there must have been a time when even that lean-faced man would have dropped his eyes before the gaze of a woman who had so much as spoken to him.

    She glanced quickly at Andy and went on. The relief! The dismal despair of the return journey was lightened. She was almost cheerful as she came up the rose-bordered path to the door.

 

 

CHAPTER 4

 

 

    In Nelson's house you stepped from the street to a big hall, around three sides of which ran a gallery reached by a broad flight of stairs.

    Nelson was standing at an easel examining a picture, and his face was hidden from her. But there was no need to see his face. The attitude was eloquent. He turned and surveyed her with a certain strange hauteur which a king might reserve for unwelcome intruders. He was a man with a narrow face, slightly bald. The nose was thin and aristocratic, the chin and mouth a little weak. A thin brown moustache, turning grey, gave him a quasi-military appearance, in keeping with a mood which at the moment was certainly militant.

    "Well," he said, "you have come back."

    He stalked slowly towards her, his hands behind him, his thin shoulders thrown back.

    "Are you aware that I have had no lunch?" he asked ominously.

    "I told you I was going to town this morning. Why didn't you ask Mary?"

    She dreaded the reply.

    "I have discharged Mary," he said, and Stella groaned inwardly.

    "You haven't discharged the cook by any chance?" she asked.

    "I have also discharged the cook."

    "Did you also pay them their wages?" she demanded, angered beyond restraint. "Oh, Father, why do you do these things?"

    "I discharged them because they were impertinent," said Mr Nelson with a gesture. "That is sufficient. I am master in my house."

    "I wish you were a little more master of yourself," she said wearily, as she walked across to the mantelpiece, took down a bottle, and held it to the light. "Why do you always discharge the servants when you are drunk, Father?"

    "Drunk?" he said, shocked.

    She nodded.

    In such moments as these she did not use euphemisms, it was not the occasion for delicacy.

    "Tomorrow you will tell me you have no recollection of anything that happened, and you will be very penitent. But I shall have to go into Beverley and find two servants who have not been discharged by us. They will be difficult to find."

    Nelson raised his eyebrows.

    "Drunk?" he repeated, but she took no notice of him, and presently, in the kitchen, where she was preparing her meal, she heard him going up the stairs, repeating "Drunk" and laughing sardonically at intervals.

    She sat by the spotless kitchen table and made her meal of a cup of chocolate and a slice of bread and butter. She looked for the cheese, though she knew her search would be fruitless. It was another characteristic of Mr Nelson that in his 'cups' he had a partiality for cheese. If he had done any work—she went out into the studio at the back of the house. The canvas she had placed for him that morning had not felt so much as the touch of a charcoal suck. Stella Nelson sighed.

    "What's the use?" she asked, addressing her query to one of the many half finished studies that hung on the wall.

    She was working at her household accounts at a small writing-table in a corner of the studio when she heard the bell tinkle, and went to the front door.