PART II (continued 2)

A certain café in a small street not far from Elsie’s home became their rendezvous. Sometimes Morrison was able to get there in the middle of the day, but generally he came at about five o’clock, and they had tea together. Very occasionally they met early in the afternoon and went out together.

Each meeting was entirely inconclusive, save in exciting Elsie almost to frenzy and reducing young Morrison to further depths of despondency.

The months dragged on. Morrison was often away, and then he and Elsie wrote to one another daily. She was entirely obsessed with the thought of her lover, and hardly ever saw Irene Tidmarsh, or went to Hillbourne Terrace. And all the while, Horace Williams said nothing.

He and his wife did not quarrel; indeed, they hardly spoke to one another, but the atmosphere between them, day by day, was becoming more heavily charged with mutual hatred and apprehension.

VI

The tension under which Elsie now lived began at last to affect her health. She slept badly, and was nervous as she had never been before.

Williams watched her without comment—a sinister little figure. Sometimes, utterly overwrought, Elsie tried to force a scene with him, but she only once succeeded in making him evince anger.

Strangely reckless, she suddenly suggested that Leslie Morrison should be invited to lodge in their house, with no slightest expectation that her husband would entertain such a scheme, but with a wild desire to provoke him to a scene that should release some of her own pent-up emotion.

“He’s looking for rooms, Geraldine says,” she declared, “and we’ve a bedroom to spare, and might as well use it.”

Williams gazed at her incredulously. “Are you aware that I’ve shown Morrison the door once already?” he asked at last.

“Yes, I’m quite aware of that,” said Elsie, with insolence in her voice. “I thought you might have got more sense now, that’s all.”

“Listen to me, Elsie. I forbade you to speak to that fellow again—and by God, if you’ve done so, I’ll see you never forget it!” His face was livid and he spoke through his clenched teeth.

“I’ll speak to whom I please.”

“Have you been meeting Morrison?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

Elsie felt a curious pleasure and relief in thus mocking at the furious jealousy that was evident in her husband’s face and manner.

“Answer my question.”

She remained silent.

“Are you and that fellow in love?”

“I’ve answered that before. I told you months ago, when you first started to insult me, that he was nothing to me.”

“That wasn’t true then—and it isn’t now. Morrison’s in love with you, damn him, and you’re in love with him!”

“Am I?”

Elsie laughed derisively in the new and uncomprehended realisation that she was no longer afraid of Horace.

“You little bitch!...”

He caught her by the shoulders and suddenly flung her against the wall.

Elsie screamed, but it was reflex action from the physical shock alone that made her do so. She was neither frightened nor very much startled. There was even an odd exhilaration for her in the sudden release of those pent-up forces that had for so long vibrated tensely between herself and her husband.

However, her arm and shoulder were bruised, and her whole body violently jarred. “You’re a coward!” she panted. “Hitting a woman!”

“You drove me to it.... Elsie, get up!... I’m sorry I did that, but you’re driving me mad. God, if I had that fellow here I’d wring the life out of him!”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Elsie taunted him. “He’s a great deal stronger than you are—he’s a man, he is—you’d never dare to touch him. All you can do is to knock a woman about.”

“That’s a lie! I’ve never touched you before, though there’s many a man in my place would have beaten you within an inch of your life. I didn’t know what I was doing just now.”

He took a step towards her, but Elsie pulled herself up from the floor without appearing to notice the movement. She felt slightly giddy, and her head ached.

“Aren’t you going to—to forgive me? I oughtn’t to have hit you, I acknowledge, but you’ve done everything to drive me to it. Elsie, swear to me that there’s nothing now between you and Morrison.”

“Oh, all right,” she said wearily. “I swear it.” She felt that she no longer cared what happened in a sudden overwhelming fatigue.

“I don’t believe you,” said Williams bitterly.

Elsie shrugged her shoulders, and turned, moving stiffly, to leave the room.

“Are you—are you hurt?”

“Yes, of course I am. My shoulder will be black and blue to-morrow, I should think.”

“Shall I get you anything?” Williams muttered, shamefaced.

She made no answer.

That afternoon Elsie rang up Leslie Morrison on the telephone after her husband had gone out. “Is that you, Les?”

“Yes. How’s yourself?”

He had told her never to be prodigal of verbal endearments in their telephone communications, and she knew that he was probably not alone, but it struck her painfully that his tone was a purely casual one, such as he might have used to anyone.

“We’ve had an awful scene, boy.”

“What—who?”

“Him—Horace—and me. The same old thing, of course—jealousy. I stood up to him, and told him I didn’t intend to put up with that sort of treatment any longer, and I’d never give up anyone I—I liked.”

“I say, Elsie, you were careful, weren’t you?” asked Morrison, his voice grown anxious.

“Yes, yes, darling, of course I was, for your sake. But Leslie—this is what happened—he knocked me down.”

There was a smothered exclamation that made her heart leap with sudden exultation. Of course Leslie cared....

“Elsie—girlie—he didn’t! Are you hurt?”

She could have laughed in pure joy at his sharply-anxious question.

“Nothing bad. Shaken, of course, and I expect there’ll be a bad bruise, but I can put up with worse than that, you know.”

“You oughtn’t to have to! The hound! I’d like to.... Look here, can’t we meet?”

“Yes, yes!” she said eagerly. “What about tea? I’ll come to——”

“The same place,” he interrupted quickly, and she understood that he did not want her to mention the name of the tea-shop that had so often served them as rendezvous.

“What time?”

“About half-past five. I shan’t get away any earlier.”

“All right, darling. I’ll be there.”

“Sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, quite all right now,” Elsie declared, laughing happily.

“I must go. See you later, then?”

“Yes. Good-bye, boy.”

The answering good-bye came to her faintly over the wires as the final click warned her that he had hung up the receiver.

Elsie looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Only three o’clock—two hours and a quarter before she could think of starting out.

The telephone rang again, and Elsie, with a joyful hope that Morrison had been unable to resist a further word, snatched at the instrument.

“Hallo, hallo! Who’s there?”

“I am—Horace,” said her husband’s flat, nasal voice. “Look here. How would you like to go to the play to-night, Elsie?”

“What!” said Elsie, disappointed at not hearing Leslie Morrison’s voice again, and still dazed from the scene of the morning.

“I said, how would you like to do a theatre to-night? I’ve got tickets for ‘The Girl on the Pier’—good places—for to-night.”

She understood at last that he was seeking to propitiate her, and to make up for his violence. “I don’t mind. What time does it start?”

“Half-past eight, but we’d better meet in town somewhere for some food. I shan’t have time to come home first. What about the Corner House, at about seven o’clock? That’ll give us plenty of time to go on to Shaftesbury Avenue afterwards.”

“All right. How many tickets have you got, Horace?”

“Just the two. I thought you and I would go by ourselves and have a jolly evening,” said the far-away voice rather tremulously.

Elsie laughed drearily as she rang off.

It seemed to her that the time dragged interminably until she could go upstairs and dress herself for the evening’s outing. She meant to meet Morrison first and then go on to the Corner House and wait there for her husband.

Elsie put on a dark blue coat and skirt, with a new pale blue jumper of artificial silk, and a big black hat with a blue feather. Round her neck she wore a small black fur.

After her variable wont, she had suddenly recovered her looks, after the sodden, stupefied ugliness that the morning’s unhappiness had produced in her. Her eyes seemed more widely opened than usual, her hair fell into thick curls and rings, and a soft, bright colour lay under her oddly prominent cheek-bones. She rubbed lip-stick on to her full, sulkily-cut mouth, and lavishly powdered her straight, beautiful neck. The glow of excitement and gladness transformed her as she went out to meet Morrison, slamming the door of the villa behind her.

“Darling!”

“My own dear little girl!” said Leslie, and held both her gloved hands for a moment in his. “I haven’t been able to think of anything but what you told me this afternoon. Are we going for a walk, or will you come in?”

“I’d like to come in and sit down,” said Elsie languidly. “Have you had tea?”

“No. I’ll order some.”

“Not for me, boy. I’m meeting Horace for a meal in about an hour and a half. We’re going to the theatre.”

“Have you made it up, then?”

“Oh, I suppose so! He telephoned and said he had these tickets. I suppose he thought it’d make up, in a way.”

They chose a corner table at the further end of the tea-shop, and Elsie took off her coat and leant against it as it lay folded over the back of her chair.

“Where did he hurt you this morning?” said Morrison intently.

She pulled up the loose sleeve of her silk jumper. “Look!”

Her smooth, soft arm was already discoloured all round the elbow and up to the shoulder.

“It’s worse higher up, only I can’t get at it now to show you.”

“Damn him!” Leslie Morrison muttered between his teeth.

His boyish face was black with an intensity of feeling that Elsie had seldom seen there of late. It sent a rush of joyful reassurance all through her.

“Darling, I don’t care about anything while we’ve got each other.”

“But it can’t go on, Elsie. He’s making your life miserable. Isn’t there any hope of a divorce, or even a separation?”

“He says he never will.”

Elsie spoke slowly. She was revolving a possibility, that she had often viewed before in her own mind.

“Les, can’t we go away together? I don’t care what happens, or what people think of me. I’d face anything, with you.”

Even as she spoke, she knew—and one side of her was relieved to know—that Morrison would negative the suggestion, as he had often done before.

“Out of the question, darling girl. Think what I’m getting—two twenty-five a year and no particular prospect of a rise for years to come. And look at what you’ve been used to!”

“Not before I married.”

“Times were different then. It was before the war. Living has gone up five hundred per cent. since then, and it’ll be many a long year before it comes down again. Why, Elsie, we couldn’t even live!”

“I don’t know whether you think I’m living now!” she exclaimed vehemently. “Existing, I call it. And we shall only be young once, Leslie, and it seems so hard to waste it all.”

He groaned, and they sat silent for a time, their hands locked together beneath the table.

“Would you be ready to—to end it all?” she asked suddenly. “I mean for us to go out together, right out of life?”

“Do you mean suicide?”

“Yes—a suicide pact.”

She fixed her eyes upon him, anxious to believe that he was startled, and acutely touched, at the lengths to which her love could carry her. The actual idea behind the word—that of suicide—conveyed very little to her. Although she believed herself to be fully in earnest, Elsie never seriously contemplated her own death, nor that of her lover.

She had often thought of Williams’s death as the one possible solution of their problem, but she had actually never really abandoned the secret expectation that a way out would be found for herself and Morrison that would secure their happiness.

She had read of suicide-pacts, and seized upon the idea eagerly as one more peg upon which to hang the proofs of her passion for Morrison, and maintain his love, and his interest in herself, at the level of her own ardour. Although never consciously owning it to herself, Elsie knew that his love was a lesser one than hers.

Leslie Morrison, now, did not make the passionate response for which she had hoped. “Don’t talk like that. Oh, Elsie, it is hard, isn’t it? And you don’t know what it’s like for me to think of that brute making your life miserable. If only there was anything I could do!... I think about it till I see red sometimes. Why doesn’t he die?”

“Because we want him to, I suppose,” said Elsie, suddenly listless. “He’s always talking about his health failing, and things like that, but I don’t see any sign of it myself. Things will never come right for us in this world, Leslie.”

“Elsie, I’ll make him get a separation; I swear I will. It’s the only possible thing. Then at least you’ll be free.”

She noticed that he did not refer to the separation between herself and her husband as to a means of furthering their own love.

“Haven’t your people ever tried to get your freedom for you?”

“Oh, I’ve nobody much, you know! Only mother and Geraldine, and the old aunties. They don’t approve of me either—never did.”

“Poor little girl, they don’t understand you!”

“I don’t care while I’ve got you, Leslie.”

They made love to one another, their voices low, until Morrison reminded Elsie suddenly that it was late.

“You’ll hardly get to the West End by seven now. I’m glad you’re going to enjoy yourself to-night, anyway.”

“I wish we were going together, Les, just you and I. That’s how it ought to be. Are we going to meet to-morrow, dearest?”

“Lunch here, can you? One o’clock. And meanwhile, darling, I’m going to think hard what I can do to make things better for you. He’s got to stop leading you this sort of life, anyway, and it’s up to me to find a way of making him do so. When I think of his knocking you about....”

The blood rushed into his face, and Elsie saw that he had clenched his hand involuntarily. It was balm to her to realise that she still had the power of exciting him to a frenzied anxiety on her account.

“He’s hit me before now, you know,” she said suddenly, hardly realising, and caring not at all, that she was not speaking the truth.

“You never told me. I’ve sometimes wondered....”

“I didn’t mean to say anything about it. I knew it would upset you.... Never mind, darling, I don’t care.”

“But I do. I tell you it’s driving me mad. Oh, what’s the good of talking when one can’t do anything! Look here, darling, I’m not fit to talk to you now—and besides, you’ll be frightfully late. I shall see you to-morrow.”

“One o’clock. Good-night, sweetheart. I wish it was you and me going to this show to-night. Wouldn’t it be heaven!”

“Indeed it would. But things may come right for us even yet, darling—don’t give up hope. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye!” she echoed.

Elsie was late for her appointment with her husband, but he did not complain. He seemed anxious to do everything in his power to conciliate her, and it was characteristic of their relations together that, as her fear of his sarcastic petulance vanished, so her contempt for him increased.

“I got dress-circle places,” said Williams impressively. “I know you like them.”

The piece, a musical comedy, amused her, and she was pleased at various glances that were cast upon her by their neighbours in the theatre. At the back of it all was a warm inward glow that pervaded all her consciousness at the remembrance of Leslie Morrison’s championship of her, his assurance that he would “think out a way.”

Perhaps Leslie would make up his mind to take her away. She had asked him to do so, and he had always refused. Elsie, with an ever-latent fear that Morrison was already beginning to tire of an attachment that to her was the one reality in life, told herself passionately that, with him, she would care nothing for poverty.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” said her husband’s nasal voice.

“Rather. Topping!”

For a minute or two she listened to the comedian on the stage, and was genuinely amused by his facial contortions and wilful mispronunciations of polysyllabic words.

“He’s so silly, you can’t help laughing at him,” Elsie declared, wiping her eyes.

Then she drifted back again into the dream wherein she and Leslie Morrison figured as sole protagonists, with complete and unexplained elimination of Horace Williams.

“Look who’s here, Elsie!”

She started violently, convinced against all reason that she would see Morrison.

“Isn’t that your aunties?”

“So it is,” said Elsie without enthusiasm.

Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie were making violent signs to her, and in the interval Horace, still evidently bent upon doing everything possible to please her, insisted upon going to speak to them, and suggested supper after the play.

“He is going it,” Elsie reflected dispassionately, not in the least touched, but a good deal amazed at the lavishness of Horace’s amends.

She was in reality very much bored by the company of the two aunts in the little restaurant to which they eventually went.

“Why don’t you go and see your poor mother, Elsie?”

“I do see her, Aunt Gertie.”

“Not very often, dear.”

“As often as I’ve time for,” said Elsie curtly.

“Geraldine’s not looking well,” Aunt Ada began next.

“What happened to that young fellow she was supposed to be going with last year?”

Horace Williams called abruptly for his bill. “It’s after twelve, and I’ve got to be at work to-morrow, if you ladies haven’t. All good things must come to an end, you know.”

“It’s been most pleasant, I’m sure,” said Aunt Gertie.

And when Horace had gone to pay the account at the cash-desk, she added sentimentally to Elsie:

“It’s a real pleasure to have seen you and him together—and so happy.”

“Thanks,” said Elsie sarcastically. “We’re as happy as the day is long, of course.”

“So you ought to be,” said Aunt Ada very sharply.

They exchanged good-byes outside the restaurant, and Elsie and her husband went by Tube to their own station.

The long suburban road was almost deserted when they came out into it.

“We’ll go by the Grove, of course,” said Elsie, indicating the narrow alleyway that eventually merged into their own street, with a high blank wall upon one side of it and the backs of a rather sordid row of houses upon the other.

A few leafless plane-trees showed above the top of the wall, and an occasional tall lamp slightly relieved the gloom of the long, paved passage-way.

Their footsteps on the stones were clearly audible in the unusual stillness that belonged both to the deserted locality and to the small hours of the morning.

“Who’s that?” said Horace so suddenly that Elsie jumped.

Footsteps were hurrying behind them, and they both turned. With a strange sense of foreknowledge, Elsie saw Leslie Morrison.

The two men stopped dead as they came face to face with one another. Elsie shrank back against the high yellow brick wall, her eyes fixed upon Morrison’s ravaged face.

“I couldn’t rest for thinking of it all. I know what happened to-day, Williams,” he said in a high, strained voice. “It can’t go on. You’re making Elsie’s life hell. Give her her freedom.”

“Damn you! Who are you to interfere between man and wife?” said Williams, low and fiercely. “I know what you want, both of you, but you won’t have it. Elsie’s my wife, and I shan’t let her go.”

“You’ve got to.”

Horace Williams, looking full at the youth, who was shaking from head to foot with excitement, gave his low, malevolent laugh.

Almost at the same instant Elsie heard her own voice screaming, “Don’t ... don’t...!” and saw the flash of a knife as Morrison raised his arm and struck again and again.

Williams spun round as though to run, and his eyes, oddly surprised-looking, glared, straight and unseeing, at Elsie.

Leslie Morrison stabbed at him again in the back.

“What have you done?” sobbed Elsie to Morrison. “Oh, go!”

She saw Morrison dash away up the passage, and at the same moment Horace Williams took a few steps forward.

“Keep up—I’ll help you!” gasped Elsie.

She thrust her arm beneath his elbow, dimly astonished and relieved to find that he was walking, when he suddenly lurched heavily against her, the upper part of his body sagging forward. Then he fell heavily and lay motionless, blood trickling from his mouth.

Elsie, utterly distraught, and her knees shaking under her, felt her screams strangled in her throat. A distant figure showed at the near end of the alley, and she flew, rather than ran, towards the stranger, calling out in a high, sobbing voice for a doctor—for help.

The woman, elderly and respectable-looking, asked what had happened.

“I don’t know,” said Elsie. A blind horror was upon her, but instinct warned her to make no definite statement of any kind.

A nightmare confusion followed. The alleyway, from being a silent and deserted spot, became clamorous with footsteps and voices. Elsie dimly heard a tall man in evening clothes saying that he was a doctor, and saw him kneel beside the blood-spattered form huddled upon the pavement. It was he, and a stalwart policeman, who finally lifted that which had been Horace Williams on to a hand-ambulance and took it away.

Another man in police uniform took Elsie’s arm, giving her the support that alone enabled her to move, and helped her to a taxi.

She almost fell into it, weeping hysterically, and he took his place beside her as a matter of course. In the sick, convulsed terror that shook her, his stolid presence was an actual relief. She thought that he was taking her home until he gently explained that she was coming with him to the police-station.

“We want to get this cleared up, you know, and you can help us by telling us just what happened.”

A new and more dreadful fear came over her. If Horace was dead someone would be accused of having killed him. They might suspect her.... Elsie felt as though she were going mad with the horror of it all.

She began hysterically to scream and cry.

VII

It was still early in the day when Elsie’s mother came to her at the police-station. Her fat face was white, stained and mottled with tears.

“It seems too bad to be true,” she kept on repeating again and again. “That’s what I said when I heard about poor Horace: too bad to be true. And you in this dreadful place, Elsie, and such a state as you’re in—and no wonder. The whole thing seems too bad to be true.”

“Have they—found anything? Shall I be able to go home soon?” asked Elsie.

“I don’t know, dearie. They’ve got to find out who killed poor Horace, you know. Elsie, you’ve always been a sensible girl. You must tell them all you know, however dreadful to you it is to speak of such things. Or I’ll tell them for you, if you’d rather just have it out with mother. Didn’t you see anyone?”

“Someone flew past, and as I turned to speak to Horace, I saw the blood coming out of his mouth.”

“Who was it flew past?” said Mrs. Palmer.

“I don’t know. It all happened in a flash, like,” said Elsie.

“You and Horace were happy together, weren’t you?”

“Yes, always,” said Elsie stolidly. She had made up her mind not to say anything else.

“You didn’t quarrel?”

“No, never.”

“You’ll tell them that, won’t you, dearie? The police, I mean.”

“It’s nothing to do with them,” said Elsie childishly.

“Now don’t talk that way. That’s silly. You don’t seem to realise, my lady, the sort of mess you’re in.”

Mrs. Palmer’s voice rose to stridency as she let her fear and her temper get the mastery of her attempt at caution.

“My God, Elsie, can’t you see what it means? They may try you for murder. Murder—the same as the horrid common people in the newspapers. Who’s to know what happened—you and Horace in that empty street at one o’clock in the morning, and he gets done in, and whatever you may say—and mind you, I’ll back you up in it-they’ll get hold of the fact that you and poor Horace didn’t hit it off together.”

“We were quite happy together.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Palmer approvingly. “You stick to that.”

Then she began to cry. “To think it should have come to this! I that have always held my head high—I don’t know what your aunts will say! It’ll be an awful shock for them.”

Elsie hardly heard what her mother was saying. Waves of physical nausea kept on passing over her, and she was conscious of nothing but thankfulness when an elderly woman in uniform came to her with a cup of tea, and suggested that she should lie down and get some sleep.

Elsie followed her, scarcely replying to Mrs. Palmer’s voluble farewell and assurances of her own speedy return.

She could not afterwards have told where it was that she was taken, but a small, narrow bed awaited her, and she flung herself on to it and fell almost at once into the trance-like sleep of utter bodily and mental exhaustion.

The same uniformed woman was waiting for her when she woke, after several hours, and the sight of her brought back in a sick rush the horrors of the morning.

“Oh, I must go home!” cried Elsie.

The woman took very little notice of her words, but she conducted her to a lavatory and helped her to make her toilette.

Cold water and the effects of sleep combined slightly to steady the wretched Elsie. “I should like to go home at once, please,” she said, in a voice that she tried in vain to render firm.

“Yes. Well, I daresay your mother will take you away as soon as you’ve answered a few questions,” said the woman indifferently and quietly. “They want you downstairs first for a few minutes now.”

“Is Mother there?”

“She’s in the waiting-room. You’ll be able to see her afterwards.”

“Afterwards?”

Elsie’s agonised perceptions fastened upon that one word. She sought with frantic and irrational intensity to pierce the veiled threat that she felt it to convey.

A man whom she knew to be a police-inspector appeared at an open door, and the uniformed woman went away.

“Now, Mrs. Williams, I’m afraid we must trouble you for a short statement,” said the man pleasantly. “Will you follow me, if you please?”

He moved forward, and Elsie saw into the room that he had just left.

Leslie Morrison was within it.

As their eyes met, it seemed to Elsie that the last shreds of self-control deserted her, and she screamed on a high and hideous note words that came incoherently and frenziedly from some power outside herself.

“Leslie, Leslie! Oh, God, what shall I do? Why did you do it? I didn’t ever mean you to do it.... I must tell the truth....”

The inspector swung sharply round and gripped her by the arm. “Do you realise what you’re saying? It is my duty to caution you that anything you say now may be used in evidence against you.”

Elsie burst into hysterical sobs and tears.

The man pushed her gently into another room where another official and a young man in plain clothes sat at a table with papers and pens in front of them.

The interrogatory that followed was conducted with grave suavity by the senior official, but Elsie was conscious only of a horror of committing herself.

She said again and again that she and her husband had always been happy together.

It was a faint relief when at last they came to actual questions of fact, and she could reply with direct statements to the enquiries as to her movements on the previous evening.

(O God, was it only last night that she and Horace had gone to the theatre—only this morning that they had started to walk home from the Tube station?)

“Mrs. Williams, I want you to tell me in your own words exactly what happened in the alleyway just before your husband was struck.”

Elsie realised with despair that she must say something.

She was not imaginative, but almost without her own knowledge she had evolved a sort of account by which, it seemed to her, confusedly, that she might safeguard herself.

“We were walking along,” she said in a trembling, almost inaudible voice, “and there wasn’t anybody in sight, and suddenly someone rushed up from behind and pushed me away from my husband. I was sort of dazed for a moment—I think I must have been pushed against the wall—and when I recovered I saw Horace—my husband—struggling with a man. Then the man ran away.”

“Did you see the man’s face?”

“No,” said Elsie, with ashen lips.

“But you know who it was?”

“It was Leslie Morrison.”

The room reeled before her eyes, and she made an ineffectual clutch at a chair.

Through a sort of thick fog she heard the official repeating in a low tone: “It was the man known as Leslie Morrison.”

Then she felt herself fall.

Her mother was with her when she recovered consciousness, and the woman who had attended to her before, and whom Mrs. Palmer now repeatedly and volubly addressed as “Matron.”

Elsie looked round her, but the officials were gone. With a groan she let her head drop backwards again on to the rail of the chair in which she found herself.

“Come along now, don’t give way. You’re better now,” said the matron briskly. “Don’t let yourself go, Mrs. Williams.”

“Oh, Elsie, Elsie,” wailed Mrs. Palmer, “whatever will become of us? Didn’t I always tell you——”

“Give her an arm, Mrs. Palmer, and I’ll take her on the other side, and we’ll get her into the other room. There’s a nice couch there, and she can lie down a bit.”

They half led, half dragged Elsie away, the matron exhorting her all the time with impersonal, professional brightness to pull herself together.

She was conscious of thankfulness when the woman left her alone with her mother, although leaving the door open behind her.

Mrs. Palmer instantly bent forward and asked with avidity: “What did you say to them, Elsie?”

“Let me alone, Mother, for pity’s sake!”

“How can I let you alone, as you call it, you unnatural girl? What a way to speak to your own mother, on whom you’re bringing sorrow and shame, and may bring worse yet, if you’re not careful! Now you tell me this, Elsie Williams, directly this minute: Did you or did you not tell them that you and Horace were on bad terms together?”

“I said we were quite happy together——”

“Stick to that,” said Mrs. Palmer significantly. “Did anyone know—any neighbour or anybody—that you quarrelled? He never made a row, or knocked you about, did he?”

“Only the once,” Elsie said automatically.

She pushed up her sleeve, then shuddered violently as she recalled that she had last made use of that same gesture in the tea-shop with Morrison.

“My goodness, did Horace do that? You must have tried him pretty high, I know. How are you going to account for that bruise, young Elsie?”

“Who’s to know about it?”

“Oh, they’ll find out fast enough! They get to know about everything. Look here, did you say that you’d been pushed against the wall by whoever it was who did in poor Horace?”

Elsie nodded, too much stunned even to wonder how her mother had become possessed of this information.

“Very well, then. Those bruises on your arm are where you fell against that wall. Don’t forget. I shall say you showed them to me, and told me about it.”

“Say what—when?” Elsie asked stupidly. “I suppose all this’ll be over before I’m quite mad, and they’ll let me go home to-day.”

Her mother’s fat face puckered up suddenly, and she began to cry with loud, gulping sobs. “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t know.”

“But what—what—for Heaven’s sake, Mother, stop that noise, and tell me what they’re going to do. What is it?” almost shrieked Elsie, striving to fight down the panic that threatened to overwhelm her.

“Don’t you understand, you little fool? (God forgive me for speaking like that!) Oh, Elsie, I’m afraid—I’m afraid they’ll—they’ll arrest you—for murder!”

“Don’t use that word!” almost screamed Elsie.

“How can I help it? Murder’s what’s been done, and it lies between you and that fellow Morrison. Elsie, how far have things gone between you and him? But there, I needn’t ask. I know you.” Mrs. Palmer wept convulsively.

She remained with her daughter until late in the afternoon, and twice during that time Elsie was summoned to a further interrogatory. She learnt that Morrison’s knife had been found close to the alley, and that he had been fetched from his office early in the day and taken away by the police.

It was after her mother had gone away, as the dusk was gathering, that Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison were charged together with the wilful murder of Horace Williams.

“For God’s sake, Mrs. Williams, tell me the whole truth!”

Elsie looked dumbly at Mr. Cleaver, too sick with fright to speak.

“Do you understand that you’re in the most frightful danger?”

A sound that just amounted to an interrogation forced its way between her dry lips.

“You know what the sentence is for anyone found guilty of wilful murder?”

Elsie screamed and shrank.

Cleaver bent forward, deep dents coming and going at the corners of his nostrils, his white face working with earnestness. She could see the sweat shining upon his forehead.

“Try and understand. You will be committed for trial for the murder of your husband.”

“But Leslie Morrison....”

“He’s in the same boat. His one idea, it seems, is to shield you—to pay the whole of the penalty himself.”

“It was him who—who....” Elsie’s voice trailed away.

“I know. But who inspired him to do it, Mrs. Williams? I tell you that nothing but absolute frankness can give you a chance.”

“Shall I be in the witness-box?”

A bewildered idea that she could still make use of her charm to serve her present cause made Elsie ask the question.

“You will be in the dock,” said Cleaver grimly. “Understand that everything—your life itself—depends upon your being absolutely straightforward with me. Don’t conceal anything—don’t attempt to. I tell you, it’s your one hope.”

Elsie stared and stared at Mr. Cleaver. “I never meant Leslie to do it!” she cried suddenly and wildly.

“But you knew he was going to?”

“No, no, no!”

“Mrs. Williams, tell me the truth. You and Morrison were madly in love with one another, and had been for over a year?”

She nodded.

“You knew that your husband would never, in any circumstances, set you free?”

“Yes. We asked him, begged him to. He—he was very cruel, Mr. Cleaver.”

“You and Morrison would not face open scandal by going away together?”

“It wasn’t that.”

“What was it, then?”

She hesitated, twisting her handkerchief round and round in her fingers.

The solicitor moistened his lips with his tongue. “Your only hope, your one and only hope in this world, Mrs. Williams, is to speak the truth. I’m powerless to help you if you won’t be open. Don’t be afraid that everything you say now will come out in the police-court; it won’t necessarily be so at all—far from it. But I can judge of nothing unless I know every single thing.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Elsie, white to the lips.

“Why would you and Morrison not have gone away together? Were you afraid?”

“We had no money.”

“I see. Morrison’s pay was very small, and you had nothing but what your husband gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Whereas if you were a widow, you had reason to suppose that Williams would leave you comfortably provided for?”

“Yes.”

“Did it not occur to you, then, that his death would be a very convenient solution of the whole problem?”

“Oh yes! How could I help thinking that?”

“You not only thought it, Mrs. Williams, you said it, and you wrote it.”

“I never——” The denial sprang from her quite instinctively.

Mr. Cleaver put up his hand authoritatively. “Wait! Do you remember a conversation with a friend of yours, Miss Irene Tidmarsh, on the eighteenth of last October, when you made use of the words, ‘I wish to the Lord that Horace would do the decent thing or go West, and let me have a chance of happiness’?”

Elsie was terrified at the precision with which her very words were quoted and the occasion known. “I can’t remember,” she gasped.

“Mrs. Williams, you must speak the truth. Remember that a great deal is known already, and banish any idea of false shame from your mind. This is a question of life and death to you: neither more nor less. If I know the truth from you, I can advise you as to the line you must take under cross-examination. Remember that it will be a terrible ordeal for you, and it’s essential that you should be properly prepared for it. And weight will be attached, without a doubt, to that conversation of yours with Miss Tidmarsh.”

“But how will they know about it?” she sobbed, forgetting her previous denial.

“Miss Tidmarsh will be called as a witness against you,” said Mr. Cleaver gravely. “We’ve got to account for those words of yours somehow, and what is more serious still—if anything could be more serious—we’ve got to keep out of sight, if we can, those damning letters of yours.”

“What letters?” screamed Elsie, a new and unbearable horror clutching at her.

“The letters, Mrs. Williams, that you have repeatedly written to Leslie Morrison during the past months.”

“They’re burnt, they’re burnt!” shrieked Elsie. “He swore he’d burn them!”

“I wish to God he had, but he never did, Mrs. Williams. Those letters may form the bulk of the evidence against you. You repeat in them, again and again, that Williams ill-treated you, made you miserable, and that you wish he was dead. In one of them occurs the words: ‘He’s ill now, and taking sleeping draughts. One little mistake in pouring out the mixture, Leslie, and you and I might be free! I’d do more than that for our love’s sake, darling.’ Do you understand the awful weight that those expressions and many, many similar ones would carry with a jury, Mrs. Williams? We’ve got to put some construction on them other than the obvious one, if we can’t get a ruling that they’re inadmissible as evidence, which is what we shall try for. I want to make it very, very clear to you. Everything depends on your co-operation. Are you fit to listen to me?”

Elsie was sobbing and writhing.

“Have you any letters whatever from Morrison?” pursued the relentless voice of the solicitor.

“No.”

“What have you done with them?”

“I burnt them all.”

He looked at her as though doubting her words. “Very few women burn their love-letters, Mrs. Williams.”

“I was afraid to keep them.”

“For fear of your husband seeing them?”

She hesitated. “Partly.”

In Elsie’s mind was a piercing recollection of the haunting fear that had obsessed her ever since the scene at the house of Madame Clara, the medium.

“Beware of the written word....”

But she would not give that reason for having destroyed Morrison’s letters to the solicitor. The strange, undying remnant of vanity that finds a lurking-place upon the most apparently trivial and unlikely ground held her back from the truth.

Elsie Williams realised that Mr. Cleaver was in grimmest earnest when he told her that only the absolute truth could possibly save her; she was prepared to tell him the truth in spite of her deadly terror and shame, but she could not bring herself to say that the reason why she had destroyed the letters of Leslie Morrison was because she could never forget the words spoken by the clairvoyante whom she had visited.

“I burnt the letters because I had nowhere to keep them, and I was afraid they might be found,” she repeated, her young face grey and ravaged.

It was the only particular in which she lied to Mr. Cleaver, and she did so with blind and irrational persistence.

After the hours that he spent with her, Elsie, physically exhausted, and psychically strung to a pitch of tension that she had never known in her life before, was left alone in her cell, face to face with her own soul.

At first, fragmentary recollections of the past forty-eight hours obsessed her. She went over and over her conversations with the police officials, her own replies to Mr. Cleaver, her mother’s hysterical ejaculations. Then she thought of Leslie Morrison, who had backed up her statements to the police, and who, when both were arrested together, had only asked through white lips: “Why her? She was not aware of my movements.”

But since her own half-unconscious betrayal of him, Elsie’s feeling for Morrison had undergone an extraordinary revulsion.

It had all turned out so utterly unlike anything that they had ever planned. It still seemed to Elsie that catastrophe had fallen, a bolt from the blue, into the midst of their lives without warning. She still felt that none of it could be true, that she must wake as from a hideous dream.

When had she had a hideous dream—something about Horace—something like this?

Dim associations of horror and bewilderment awoke slowly within her, and brought to her the remembrance of her visit with Irene Tidmarsh to the woman who had called herself “clairvoyante.” She had talked in a deep, rather artificial voice about love and intrigue; she had bade Elsie beware of the written word. And then all of a sudden the atmosphere had altered, Madame Clara’s voice itself had altered, horribly, and she had screamed out terrifying words and phrases. “Blood, and worse than blood ... you’re all over blood! O, my God, what’s this? It’s all over England—you—they’re talking about you.”

Elsie understood. In a flash of searing, anguished intuition she understood what would happen.

With the appalling rapidity of a vision, there came to her the realisation of all that would come to pass in the near future.

She knew already that the police-court trial was the almost certain preliminary to her committal and Morrison’s for trial at the Old Bailey. They would be tried for murder.

She and the man who had been her lover would stand in the dock together as prisoners; lawyers would fight out questions concerning their past relations; people would give evidence against them—evidence in their favour; Elsie would in all probability hear her own letters to Leslie Morrison read aloud in court....

It would be a sensational trial, such as she had often followed with avidity in the newspapers.

“It’s all over England—they’re talking about you....”

But why ... why?...

Elsie Williams’ instant of vision fled from her as suddenly as it had come, and left her agonisedly and wildly rebellious, bewildered at the vortex of terror and shame and misery into which it seemed to her that she had suddenly, without volition of her own, been flung.

She could not trace the imperceptibly-graduated stages that had brought her to the pass where catastrophe became inevitable. To her, it seemed that she had swiftly been hurled from security into deadly peril by some agency as irresistible as it was malignant.

Every now and then realisation came to her, when certain frightful words sprang into frightful meaning, as they had never done before.

“Murder....”

“Conspiracy ... and incitement to murder....”

“Principal in the second degree....” The police officials had made use of that expression—so had Mr. Cleaver.

Elsie’s mother had fetched Mr. Cleaver, and had wildly repeated, in front of Elsie and the lawyer, that she would grudge no expense, not if it cost her her last penny.

“And the aunties will help, Elsie, they’ve been ever so good—anything we can get together, says your Aunt Gertie, and her face the colour of the tablecloth. Mr. Cleaver here will tell us the best man, if it—if it comes to—to....”

“You could scarcely do better than Sir Cambourne Trevor, Mrs. Palmer, but his fee, I ought to warn you, is a thousand guineas.”

“A thousand guineas!” Elsie and Mrs. Palmer had screamed together.

And Mr. Cleaver, gaunt and haggard and grey-faced, had made answer: “It’s her life that will be at stake.”

From time to time, Elsie understood. She knew, at those moments, what it all meant. There would be no more concealments, everything would be dragged out into a publicity that could only bring with it dishonour and shameful notoriety, and hatred, and execration.

And she would have to live through it—to suffer through an ordeal of vast, incredible magnitude, of which the climax—she knew it in a prescience that mercifully could not endure—would come in the ghastly dawn of a prison-yard, beneath the shadow of the scaffold....

Inexorable results would be suffered by herself, and she would never know how it was that these things had become inevitable—had happened.

Dawlish, 1923.

THE BOND OF UNION