simply sat face to face with the sheer difficulty of living on at all. He even concluded in a kind of lethargy that if nothing had occurred, no ‘change,’ he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet Lawford, in his best visitor’s room, deciding between inscrutable life and just—death. He supposed he was tired out. His thoughts hadn’t even the energy to complete themselves. None cared but himself and this—this Silence. 

 ‘But what does it all mean?’ the insistent voice he was getting to know so well began tediously inquiring again. And every time he raised his eyes, or, rather, as in many cases it seemed, his eyes raised themselves, they saw this haunting face there—a face he no longer bitterly rebelled at, nor dimmed with scrutiny, but a face that was becoming a kind of hold on life, even a kind of refuge, an ally. It was a face that might have come out of a rather flashy book; or such as is revered on the stage. ‘A rotten bad face,’ he whispered at it in his own familiar slang, after some such abrupt encounter; a fearless, packed, daring, fascinating face, with even—what?—a spice of genius in it. Whose the devil’s face was it? What on earth was the matter?... ‘Brazen it out,’ a jubilant thought cried suddenly; ‘follow it up; play the game! give me just one opening. Think—think what I’ve risked!’ 

 And all these voices thought Lawford, in deadly lassitude, meant only one thing—insanity. A blazing, impotent indignation seized him. He leaned near, peering as it were out of a red dusky mist. He snatched up the china candlestick, and poised it above the sardonic reflection, as if to throw. Then slowly, with infinite pains, he drew back from the glass and replaced the candlestick on the table; stuffed his paper packet into his pocket, took off his boots and threw himself on to the bed. In a little while, in the faint, still light, he opened drowsily wondering eyes. ‘Poor old thing!’ his voice murmured, ‘Poor old Sheila!’ 

 

 CHAPTER FIVE

 It was but little after daybreak when Mrs Lawford, after listening at his door a while, turned the key and looked in on her husband. Blue-grey light from between the venetian blinds just dusked the room. She stood in a bluish dressing-gown, her hand on her bosom, looking down on the lean impassive face. For the briefest instant her heart had leapt with an indescribable surmise; to fall dull as lead once more. Breathing equably and quietly, the strange figure lay stretched upon the bed. ‘How can he sleep? How can he sleep?’ she whispered with a black and hopeless indignation. What a night she had had! And he! 

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