He left the common. A lamplighter was lighting the lamps. A thin evening haze was on the air. If only he had stayed at home that fateful afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to venture out? And even with the thought welled up into his mind an intense desire to go to the old green timeworn churchyard again; to sit there contentedly alone, where none heeded the completest metamorphosis, down beside the yew-trees. What a fool he had been. There alone, of course, lay his only possible chance of recovery. He would go tomorrow. Perhaps Sheila had not yet discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in repeating so successful a stratagem.
Remembrance of his miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly returned to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch. Poor old lady. He would make amends for his discourtesy when he was quite himself again. She should some day hear, perhaps, his infinitely tragic, infinitely comic experience from his own lips. He would take her some flowers, some old keepsake of his mother’s. What would he not do when the old moods and brains of the stupid Arthur Lawford, whom he had appreciated so little and so superficially, came back to him.
He ran up the steps and stopped dead, his hand in his pocket, chilled and aghast. Sheila had taken his keys. He stood there, dazed and still, beneath the dim yellow of his own fanlight; and once again that inward spring flew back. “Brazen it out; brazen it out! Knock and ring!”
He knocked flamboyantly, and rang.
There came a quiet step and the door opened. “Dr. Simon, of course, has called?” he inquired suavely.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, and gone?—as I feared. And Mrs. Lawford?”
“I think Mrs. Lawford is in, sir.”
Lawford put out a detaining hand. “We will not disturb her; we will not disturb her. I can find my way up; oh yes, thank you!”
But Ada still palely barred the way. “I think, sir,” she said, “Mrs. Lawford would prefer to see you herself; she told me most particularly ‘all callers.’ And Mr. Lawford was not to be disturbed on any account.”
“Disturbed? God forbid!” said Lawford, but his dark eyes failed to move these lightest hazel. “Well,” he continued nonchalantly, “perhaps—perhaps it—would be as well if Mrs. Lawford should know that I am here. No, thank you, I won’t come in. Please go and tell—” But even as the maid turned to obey, Sheila herself appeared at the dining-room door in hat and veil.
Lawford hesitated an immeasurable moment. In one swift glance he perceived the lamplit mystery of evening, beckoning, calling, pleading—Fly, fly! Home’s here for you. Begin again, begin again. And there before him in quiet and hostile decorum stood maid and mistress. He took off his hat and stepped quickly in.
“So late, so very late, I fear,” he began glibly. “A sudden call, a perfectly impossible distance. Shall we disturb him, do you think?”
“Wouldn’t it,” began Sheila softly, “be rather a pity perhaps? Dr. Simon seemed to think. … But, of course, you must decide that.”
Ada turned quiet small eyes.
“No, no, by no means,” he almost mumbled.
And a hard, slow smile passed over Sheila’s face. “Excuse me one moment,” she said; “I will see if he is awake.” She swept swiftly forward, superb and triumphant, beneath the gaze of those dark, restless eyes. But so still was home and street that quite distinctly a clear and youthful laughter was heard, and light footsteps approaching. Sheila paused. Ada, in the act of closing the door, peered out. “Miss Alice, ma’am,” she said.
And in this infinitesimal advantage of time Dr. Ferguson had seized his vanishing opportunity, and was already swiftly mounting the stairs. Mrs. Lawford stood with veil half raised and coldly smiling lips and, as if it were by prearrangement, her daughter’s laughing greeting from the garden, and from the landing above her, a faint “Ah, and how are we now?” broke out simultaneously. And Ada, silent and discreet, had thrown open the door again to the twilight and to the young people ascending the steps.
Lawford was still sitting on his bed before a cold and ashy hearth when Sheila knocked at the door.
“Yes?” he said; “who’s there?” No answer followed. He rose with a shuddering sigh and turned the key. His wife entered.
“That little exhibition of finesse was part of our agreement, I suppose?”
“I say—” began Lawford.
“To creep out in my absence like a thief, and to return like a mountebank; that was part of our compact?”
“I say,” he stubbornly began again, “did you wire for Alice?”
“Will you please answer my question? Am I to be a mere catspaw in your intrigues, in this miserable masquerade before the servants? To set the whole place ringing with the name of a doctor that doesn’t exist, and a bedridden patient that slips out of the house with his bedroom key in his pocket! Are you aware that Ada has been hammering at your door every half-hour of your absence? Are you aware of that? How much,” she continued in a low, bitter voice, “how much should I offer for her discretion?”
“Who was that with Alice?” inquired the same toneless voice.
“I refuse to be ignored. I refuse to be made a child of. Will you please answer me?”
Lawford turned. “Look here, Sheila,” he began heavily, “what about Alice? If you wired: well, it’s useless to say anything more. But if you didn’t, I ask you just this one thing. Don’t tell her!”
“Oh, I perfectly appreciate a father’s natural anxiety.”
Her husband drew up his shoulders as if to receive
