“His mother.”

The bright, mechanical smile of Mr. Blunt gleamed at us right down the room, but he didn’t, as it were, follow it in his body.  He swerved to the nearest of the two big fireplaces and finding some cigarettes on the mantelpiece remained leaning on his elbow in the warmth of the bright wood fire.  I noticed then a bit of mute play.  The heiress of Henry Allegre, who could secure neither obscurity nor any other alleviation to that invidious position, looked as if she would speak to Blunt from a distance; but in a moment the confident eagerness of her face died out as if killed by a sudden thought.  I didn’t know then her shrinking from all falsehood and evasion; her dread of insincerity and disloyalty of every kind.  But even then I felt that at the very last moment her being had recoiled before some shadow of a suspicion.  And it occurred to me, too, to wonder what sort of business Mr. Blunt could have had to transact with our odious visitor, of a nature so urgent as to make him run out after him into the hall?  Unless to beat him a little with one of the sticks that were to be found there?  White hair so much like an expensive wig could not be considered a serious protection.  But it couldn’t have been that.  The transaction, whatever it was, had been much too quiet.  I must say that none of us had looked out of the window and that I didn’t know when the man did go or if he was gone at all.  As a matter of fact he was already far away; and I may just as well say here that I never saw him again in my life.  His passage across my field of vision was like that of other figures of that time:  not to be forgotten, a little fantastic, infinitely enlightening for my contempt, darkening for my memory which struggles still with the clear lights and the ugly shadows of those unforgotten days.

CHAPTER IV

It was past four o’clock before I left the house, together with Mills.  Mr. Blunt, still in his riding costume, escorted us to the very door.  He asked us to send him the first fiacre we met on our way to town.  “It’s impossible to walk in this get-up through the streets,” he remarked, with his brilliant smile.

At this point I propose to transcribe some notes I made at the time in little black books which I have hunted up in the litter of the past; very cheap, common little note-books that by the lapse of years have acquired a touching dimness of aspect, the frayed, worn-out dignity of documents.

Expression on paper has never been my forte.  My life had been a thing of outward manifestations.  I never had been secret or even systematically taciturn about my simple occupations which might have been foolish but had never required either caution or mystery.  But in those four hours since midday a complete change had come over me.  For good or evil I left that house committed to an enterprise that could not be talked about; which would have appeared to many senseless