“Well, I must go now,” she said at last. And then, for she saw the sudden darkening of his face, “You may as well come with me as far as the corner of Great Smith Street, Roger. It’s quite dark now.”
Once more she allowed him to kiss her. Once more there came from her the response which had now for so long been lacking, and of which the lack made him feel so desolate.
As they walked along the now shrouded, deserted little back streets of old Westminster, Ivy Lexton was very gentle in her manner to the man who loved her with so wholehearted and selfless a devotion.
She had quite decided that soon they must part, never to meet again. And yet, though Gretorex would never know it, it was to him, albeit indirectly, that she would owe her splendid freedom, and all that freedom was to bring to her. It was that knowledge, maybe, that made her manner so gentle and so kind.
When at last Jervis Lexton came in, he found his wife playing patience in the pretty sitting-room where she spent so little of her time.
He felt a little surprised, for unless she happened to be out, as was the case six nights out of seven, Ivy always went to bed early.
“Thank God, I’m safe home again!” he exclaimed. “It was the most awful show. The grub wasn’t bad, but the champagne was like syrup. I’ve ‘some thirst,’ I can tell you!”
“Wait a minute, and”—she smiled a gay little smile—“I’ll mix you a highball, old boy. Would you like a Bizzy Izzy, just as a treat?”
“The answer, ma’am, is ‘yes’!”
She went off into the dining-room, and took from the fine old mahogany brassbound wine-cooler a bottle of rye whisky and a bottle of sherry. Then, carefully, she poured a small wineglass of each into a tall glass.
With the glass in her hand she hurried down the passage, and so into the bright, clean, empty kitchen. There she soon found some ice, and, after having chipped off a number of small pieces, she waited a moment and listened intently, for she did not want to be surprised in what she was about to do.
But the old cook was lying sound asleep in the bedroom which lay beyond the kitchen. Ivy could even hear her long, drawn-out snores.
Opening a cupboard door very, very quietly, she found a syphon, and filled up the glass almost to the top with soda-water. Then, quickly, she mixed in with a clean wooden spoon a good pinch of the powder she had secreted in the pochette of her bag.
“A perfect Bizzy Izzy!” Ivy called out gaily as she swiftly went down the corridor, holding in her steady hand the tall glass, now full almost to the brim.
Through the hall and back into the sitting-room she hurried, and then she watched, with an odd sensation of excitement, her husband toss off the delicious iced drink.
“This soda fizz has got a bitter tang to it,” he exclaimed, “but it’s none the worse for that!”
Ivy stayed awake for a long time that night. She had suddenly begun to feel afraid, she hardly knew of what. But at last she dropped off to sleep.
At nine o’clock the next morning she awoke. What was it that had happened last night? Then she remembered.
Leaping out of bed she rushed across the dressing-table, on which there lay the mother-of-pearl bolster bag she had had out with her last night. Opening it she took out her handkerchief, her powder puff, and her purse. Then she put the bag, now quite empty save for the white powder the tiny white leather-lined inner recess contained, into an old despatch-box which had belonged to her father.
It was the only “lock up” Ivy Lexton possessed; at no time of her life had she been so foolish as to keep dangerous love-letters more than a very short time. She put the despatch-box in what was the empty half of a huge Victorian inlaid wardrobe. Then she got into bed again, and rang the bell.
A moment later the day-maid opened the bedroom door.
“Mr. Lexton was ill in the night, ma’am. He thinks he ate something last evening that didn’t agree with him. He asked me to tell you that he’s not going to the office this morning.”
VI
It was the eighth of November, a day which, though she never realised it, altered the whole of Ivy Lexton’s life. And this was the more extraordinary because she was usually quick enough to realise the importance of everything that concerned herself.
But on this day she was feeling secretly excited, anxious, and what to herself she called “nervy,” for her husband’s illness, though it had only lasted just over a week, seemed to her intolerably long-drawn-out.
Jervis Lexton, poor devil, was putting up a grim, instinctive fight for life. Coming of a long line of sporting, out-of-door, country squires and their placid wives, he was magnificently healthy, hard-bitten, and possessed of reserves of physical strength on which he was now drawing daily larger and larger drafts.
On the morning when she had first been told that Jervis had been taken ill in the night, Ivy had gone down to Rushworth’s city office. There, as she put it afterwards when telling the invalid of her interview with Mr. James, the man he called his boss, “red carpets had been put down for her,” and no difficulty at all had been made as to Lexton’s staying away.
As a matter of fact, the young man had very soon been sized up as being, from a business point of view, hopeless. But his pleasant, easy manners, and his inexhaustible fund of small
