At that time the batches of papers brought by the last mail reported a series of crimes in the East End of London, there was a sensational case of abduction in France and a fine display of armed robbery in Australia.  One afternoon crossing the dining-room I heard Miss Jacobus piping in the verandah with venomous animosity:  “I don’t know what your precious papa is plotting with that fellow.  But he’s just the sort of man who’s capable of carrying you off far away somewhere and then cutting your throat some day for your money.”

There was a good half of the length of the verandah between their chairs.  I came out and sat down fiercely midway between them.

“Yes, that’s what we do with girls in Europe,” I began in a grimly matter-of-fact tone.  I think Miss Jacobus was disconcerted by my sudden appearance.  I turned upon her with cold ferocity: 

“As to objectionable old women, they are first strangled quietly, then cut up into small pieces and thrown away, a bit here and a bit there.  They vanish—­”

I cannot go so far as to say I had terrified her.  But she was troubled by my truculence, the more so because I had been always addressing her with a politeness she did not deserve.  Her plump, knitting hands fell slowly on her knees.  She said not a word while I fixed her with severe determination.  Then as I turned away from her at last, she laid down her work gently and, with noiseless movements, retreated from the verandah.  In fact, she vanished.

But I was not thinking of her.  I was looking at the girl.  It was what I was coming for daily; troubled, ashamed, eager; finding in my nearness to her a unique sensation which I indulged with dread, self-contempt, and deep pleasure, as if it were a secret vice bound to end in my undoing, like the habit of some drug or other which ruins and degrades its slave.

I looked her over, from the top of her dishevelled head, down the lovely line of the shoulder, following the curve of the hip, the draped form of the long limb, right down to her fine ankle below a torn, soiled flounce; and as far as the point of the shabby, high-heeled, blue slipper, dangling from her well-shaped foot, which she moved slightly, with quick, nervous jerks, as if impatient of my presence.  And in the scent of the massed flowers I seemed to breathe her special and inexplicable charm, the heady perfume of the everlastingly irritated captive of the garden.

I looked at her rounded chin, the Jacobus chin; at the full, red lips pouting in the powdered, sallow face; at the firm modelling of the cheek, the grains of white in the hairs of the straight sombre eyebrows; at the long eyes, a narrowed gleam of liquid white and intense motionless black, with their gaze so empty of thought, and so absorbed in their fixity that she seemed to be staring at her own lonely image, in some far-off mirror hidden from my sight amongst the trees.

And suddenly, without looking at me, with the appearance of a person speaking to herself, she asked, in that voice slightly harsh yet mellow and always irritated: