True, his mother was far too clever, too devoted to him, her only child, not to guess, even then, that he was in love with Ivy. She had even ventured to say a word to him as to the danger of too close a friendship with a married woman. And he had bitterly resented it. He remembered her words, and his answer, “You’re wrong, mother. Ivy Lexton is the best and purest woman I have ever known!”
No wonder that, as he had gone in and out of the poor dwellings of his patients this morning, he had asked himself, again and again, how long it would be before he and Ivy could declare their love?
He remembered a war widow in their neighbourhood who had married again within four months of her husband’s being killed. Still, the world is very different in peacetime from what it is in wartime. All he would have to consider would be his own mother’s sense of what was right and fitting.
Ivy’s friends? His sensitive lips curled in disdain. They would scarcely be surprised if she remarried a week after her husband’s death!
Then, suddenly, there came over him a feeling which, to such a man as Roger Gretorex, was painfully like shame.
Jervis Lexton had been something of a wastrel and all of a fool, but the young man had also been, according to his lights, a good husband. It was not Jervis’s fault that Ivy had never loved him. Her heartless, money-loving mother had forced her into the marriage when she was almost a child. Such was the story she had told Gretorex, and that story he implicitly believed.
He told himself that the only decent thing to do, now, would be to write her a short note of regret and sympathy, as cold and colourless as hers had been.
How he longed, how he ached, to see her! But it was clear she wished to see no one, not even him, the one closest to her, yet.
The long morning of pent-up emotion, and of really hard work, had tired him out—made him feel, too, suddenly very hungry. He got up and took his hat off the peg on the door, intending to snatch a hasty meal at a restaurant in Victoria Street hard by.
Then, just as he was turning towards the door, the telephone bell rang. With a feeling of irritation he took up the receiver.
“Yes?” he called out impatiently.
And then there came over him a thrill of intense joy, for the voice which said in a tremulous tone, “Is that you, darling?” was Ivy Lexton’s voice.
She had not called him “darling” once, since her return to London, and that though he knew she often used the endearing term, even to the pet dogs of her women friends.
“Of course it is,” he answered tenderly. “How are you, dearest? A little less tired and”—he forced himself to add the word—“unhappy?”
And then he heard her voice again; but now it was full of a kind of cold urgency.
“I’ve something so dreadfully important to say to you—are you alone in the house?”
“Absolutely alone,” he called back reassuringly.
He did not count Mrs. Huntley, the old woman who lived a door or two off, and who “did” for him, as anybody.
“Please don’t say my name, and I won’t say yours. Telephones are tapped sometimes, and I’m so—so frightened,” came the whispered words.
There followed a long pause, and Gretorex suddenly felt filled with an unreasoning sensation of acute apprehension. There had been that in Ivy’s tremulous tones which he had never heard there before—a note of horrible fear.
“Are you listening?” came at last the beloved voice, sounding now startlingly near.
“I can hear you perfectly.”
“Something so dreadful has happened! I don’t know how to tell you. It’s so—so strange. You’d never guess what it was!”
He tried to curb his anxiety, his suspense, his impatience.
“What is it that has happened?” he asked quietly.
Again there followed a long unnatural pause. Then, at last, Ivy Lexton breathed the words:
“The doctors found out yesterday that poor—you know who I mean—did not die what they call a natural death.”
“Not a natural death?” he repeated in a tone of amazement. “What do you mean, darling?”
“They say he died of some kind of poison.”
“Poison! D’you mean he committed suicide?” he asked incredulously.
“Oh, no, they don’t think that.”
Then, in a tone of great relief, she added: “But I suppose he may have done so.”
Gretorex felt not only exceedingly surprised, but inexpressibly shocked as well.
“I should be very loth to believe that,” he said at last.
“What I really want to tell you is that a dreadful man has been to see me this morning. He’s only been gone about half an hour. I was afraid to telephone from my own—” She waited a moment, then uttered the word “house.” “I’m speaking from a call office.”
“What did the man say? Who was he?” he asked.
“He had to do with the police and he said he was going to see you as soon as he’d had something to eat. I said you generally went to your club to lunch, and that you wouldn’t be back before three.”
“Why should he want to see me?” Gretorex said wonderingly.
“He seemed to know so much about you. So much”—her voice sank—“about us. He asked me such funny questions, darling. Of course I told him—I told him,” her voice faltered, “that you were just a great friend of mine and of—you know of whom?”
“So I am. So I was—”
But Roger Gretorex was no fool, and his whole being had become flooded, these last few
