In Accordance with the Evidence Part 21

But I had had enough of this. Gently but irresistibly I took her arm.

"Come along, Kitty," I said quietly. "I particularly want to talk to you."

She quailed, but still hung back.

"Very well," I said. "Will you tell me where you're going?"

She was obstinately silent.

"You're going with Evie, of course?"

I knew by the little rush with which she spoke that she was telling the truth and was relieved to be able to do so. "Oh no!" she said. "I'm going quite alone, quite alone--honour, Jeff!"

"Evie's not going with you--to Store Street or wherever it is?"

She stiffened. "I don't know what you mean by Store Street, and I think you've got Evie on the brain," she said.

What the devil ailed them all?

And why had Evie said she was going with Kitty?

As abruptly as I turned away from the one I now turned away from the other.

The next moment: "Er--'Jeffries!" I Heard.

It was Weston with my five shillings. I turned.

"Oh, Jeffries! I'm sorry to say--glad in one sense of course--that Professor Hitchc.o.c.k will be taking the cla.s.s again next Friday. The college wishes--wishes to thank you for stopping the gap as you have done. It's been most obliging of you."

I said something--I was glad Hitchc.o.c.k was better, I said.

"Yes--er--he's quite well again now--quite on his feet again," said the secretary-bird. "And--er--Jeffries--I'm exceedingly sorry, but I've a rather unpleasant duty to perform."

I was utterly mystified. "What is it now?" I demanded almost roughly.

"It's that the Board is of opinion--has come to the conclusion--that consisting as we do of younger students than yourself--it would be of advantage--perhaps of advantage to you too if--if----"

I helped him out. "If I don't come again?"

"I wished to break it gently to you--but that _is_ the substance of it,"

he stammered.

Curious....

"Thank you, Weston," I said. "I quite understand. Will you please tell them that I didn't ask for any explanation?"

Exceedingly curious....

"Yes, yes, yes," he murmured sympathetically.

"Now," I said to myself some minutes later, as I descended the stairs, "it only requires Miss Angela to turn me down."

I walked to Woburn Place, and there asked a Swiss boy if I might see Miss Angela. Archie's friend Mr Shoto pa.s.sed me as I waited in the hall, but I did not speak to him. After some minutes the Swiss boy returned.

His answer was what I expected. Miss Soames had a nervous headache, and asked to be excused from seeing me.

And all, I thought with amazement as I turned away, because for a week or two I had worn a sky-blue uniform!

IV

That division of me into two men that I have said dated from the time when Kitty told me of Evie's engagement to Archie Merridew was, in a sense, no new thing. I had felt it in some measure before, when I had deliberately avoided Archie that I might give my anger its head and had smiled in his face again when the fit had worked itself out. I had striven, too, to stand between him and the black rages he and my general circ.u.mstances had provoked.

But no sooner had the words, that Evie was now definitely engaged, come from Kitty's lips than I knew this division to be complete and irrevocable. Even did he withdraw in time he had still contemplated it; and in my soul I did not now believe he would withdraw. "The Devil was sick, the Devil a Saint would be." And I knew at last who his friend in Store Street was. A name, seen on a medicine bottle in his room, had leaped into my memory. His "friend" was some obscure pract.i.tioner of a doctor.

So I now became as the Giant in the story, who was so exquisitely cloven from head to middle by the magic blade that he did not feel the wound that was his death. "Cut, then!" he laughed. "Shake yourself," he was told. And he fell in twain.

A shake, and I too should fall in twain.

I will now tell you how I got that shake.

Thinking over my sudden ostracism in Pettinger's house that night I only became more and more mystified. That the Business College should no longer require me I could understand--for sn.o.bbery plays a terrible part in business. That Kitty had reproached me for my lack of trust in her about my commissionaire's post was also easily to be accounted for. Miss Angela might in truth have had a headache and have begged to be excused from receiving me. But that Evie should turn against me was inexplicable. It contradicted every tradition of her upbringing. My being forced into a humble, but not ign.o.ble, occupation could never have made this difference in her. If anything in the whole business could be taken as a certainty, that could. And so the more I thought about it the more sure I became that, though I myself might conceal my real reason for wishing to see Archie Merridew by giving out that I merely wanted to remonstrate with him about his chattering, others were using that very giving-out as a screen for something I was in total ignorance of.

Kitty's timorousness returned to me; I believed now that she had actually been trying to tell me something else, whatever it was; and so I tossed and turned on my pillow, vainly racking my brain.

I finally decided to have it out with both Kitty and Archie on the morrow.

I went up to town the next morning, and walked straight to the Business College. I did not wish, after what I had been told the night before, to go up, so I found an office boy on one of the lower floors and sent him up with word that somebody would like to see Miss Windus. Then I waited, just inside the Holburn entrance.

In a few minutes she came down, hatted and gloved. Her face looked old; her eyes were dull, and almost closed--with weeping, I was instantly sure; and she touched my sleeve almost as if she feared I might shake her hand off again.

"I thought it would be you," she said, in a dull voice. "Let's have a walk. I've something to say."

We walked without speaking along Holborn, and presently turned into the little courtyard of Staple's Inn. We sat down on the bench that surrounds the tree in the middle.

She had broken into speech almost before we sat down. It was as if she feared that if she did not get it out at once she would not speak at all. She was intensely agitated.

"Jeff," she said, "I've wronged you--cruelly and basely."

I did not smile at the melodramatic little phrase. I had not the ghost of an idea what she meant, but that something was impending I was already aware.

"I saw you didn't know last night," she went on. "This morning?"

It was a question. "I'm no wiser this morning," I said.

"You asked me where I was going last night."

"I did."

"Can you guess why when--when I tell you it was to Louie Causton's?"