Yes, there it was on his sleeve. There were little drops of blood on the stair carpet. She could trace him all the way up the stairs by this. She went straight to his room and knocked.
He answered instantly.
“Who is that?”
“It is I. I want to see you.”
“I am rather tired,” he said.
“Please let me in. I want to see you.”
She tried the door, but it was locked. Then she heard the bed creak as he moved. An instant later the bolt was slipped, and the light shone through the fanlight over the door.
He was almost fully dressed, she observed.
“What is the matter with your arm?” she asked.
It was carefully bandaged.
“I hurt it. It is nothing very much.”
“How did you hurt it?” she asked impatiently.
She was nearing the end of her resources. She wanted him to say that it had happened in a taxicab smash or one of the street accidents to which city dwellers are liable, but he did not explain.
She asked to see the wound. He was unwilling, but she insisted. At last he unwrapped the bandage, and showed an ugly little gash on the forearm. It was too rough to be the clean-cut wound of a knife or of broken glass.
There was a second wound about the size of a sixpence near the elbow.
“That looks like a bullet wound,” she said, and pointed. “It has glanced along your arm, and has caught you again near the elbow.”
He did not speak.
She procured warm water from the bathroom and bathed it, found a cool emollient in her room and dressed it as well as she could.
She did not again refer to the circumstances under which the injury had been sustained. This was not the time nor the place to discuss that.
“There is an excellent nurse spoilt in you,” he said when she had finished.
“I am afraid there is an excellent man spoilt in you,” she answered in a low voice, “and I am rather inclined to think that I have done the spoiling.”
“Please get that out of your head altogether,” he said almost roughly. “A man is what he makes himself: you know the tag—the evil you do by two and two you answer for one by one; and even if you had any part in the influencing of my life for evil, I am firstly and lastly responsible.”
“I am not so sure of that,” said she.
She had made him a little sling in which to rest his arm.
“You married me because you loved me, because you gave to me all that a right-thinking woman would hold precious and sacred and because you expected me to give something in return. I have given you nothing. I humiliated you at the very outset by telling you why I had married you. You have the dubious satisfaction of knowing that I bear your name. You have, perhaps, half a suspicion that you live with one who is everlastingly critical of your actions and your intentions. Have I no responsibilities?”
There was a long silence, then she said—
“Whatever you wish me to do I will always do.”
“I wish you to be happy, that is all,” he replied.
His voice was of the same hard, metallic tone which she had noted before.
She flushed a little. It had been an effort for her to say what she had, and he had rebuffed her. He was within his rights, she thought.
She left him, and did not see him till the morning when they met at breakfast. They exchanged a few words of greeting, and both turned their attention to their newspapers. Edith read hers in silence, read the one column which meant so much to her from end to end twice, then she laid the paper down.
“I see,” she said, “that our burglars rifled the Bank of the Northern Provinces last night.”
“So I read,” he said, without raising his eyes from his paper.
“And that one of them was shot by the armed guard of the bank.”
“I’ve also seen that,” said her husband.
“Shot,” she repeated, and looked at his bandaged arm.
He nodded.
“I think my paper is a later edition than yours,” he said gently. “The man that was shot was killed. They found his body in a taxicab. His name is not given, but I happen to know that it was a very pleasant florid gentleman named Persh. Poor fellow,” he mused, “it was poetic justice.”
“Why?” she asked.
“He did this,” said Gilbert Standerton, and pointed to his arm with a grim smile.
XI
The Fourth Man
On the night of Gilbert Standerton’s little dinner party the black-bearded taxi driver, who had called at the house off Charing Cross Road for instructions, came to the door of No. 43, and was duly observed by the detective on duty. He went into the house, was absent five minutes, and came out again, driving off without a fare.
Ten minutes later, at a signal from the detective, the house was visited by three C.I.D. men from Scotland Yard, and the mystery of the taxicab driver was cleared up forever.
For, instead of George Wallis, they discovered sitting at his ease in the drawing-room upstairs, and reading a novel with evident relish, that same black-bearded chauffeur.
“It is very simple,” said Inspector Goldberg, “the driver comes up and George Wallis is waiting inside made up exactly like him. The moment he enters the door and closes it Wallis opens it, and steps out on to the car and drives off. You people watching thought it was the same driver returned.”
He looked at his prisoner.
“Well, what are you going to do?” asked the bearded man.
“I am afraid there is nothing we can do with you,” said Goldberg regretfully. “Have you got a licence?”
“You bet your life I have,” said the driver cheerfully, and produced it.
“I can take you for consorting with criminals.”
“A difficult charge to prove,” said the bearded one, “more difficult to get a conviction on, and possibly it would absolutely spoil your chance of bagging
