away without a sketching-box which he had had no intention of buying.  The young lady was too energetic for him.  He was afraid of being too curt with her lest she should turn on him and tell him that pretence was useless—­she knew he was Priam Farll.  He felt guilty, and he felt that he looked guilty.  As he hurried along the High Street towards the river with the paint-box it appeared to him that policemen observed him inimically and cocked their helmets at him, as who should say:  “See here; this won’t do.  You’re supposed to be in Westminster Abbey.  You’ll be locked up if you’re too brazen.”

The tide was out.  He sneaked down to the gravelly shore a little above the steamer pier, and hid himself between the piles, glancing around him in a scared fashion.  He might have been about to commit a crime.  Then he opened the sketch-box, and oiled the palette, and tried the elasticity of the brushes on his hand.  And he made a sketch of the scene before him.  He did it very quickly—­in less than half-an-hour.  He had made thousands of such colour ‘notes’ in his life, and he would never part with any of them.  He had always hated to part with his notes.  Doubtless his cousin Duncan had them now, if Duncan had discovered his address in Paris, as Duncan probably had.

When it was finished, he inspected the sketch, half shutting his eyes and holding it about three feet off.  It was good.  Except for a few pencil scrawls done in sheer absent-mindedness and hastily destroyed, this was the first sketch he had made since the death of Henry Leek.  But it was very good.  “No mistake who’s done that!” he murmured; and added:  “That’s the devil of it.  Any expert would twig it in a minute.  There’s only one man that could have done it.  I shall have to do something worse than that!” He shut up the box and with a bang as an amative couple came into sight.  He need not have done so, for the couple vanished instantly in deep disgust at being robbed of their retreat between the piles.

Alice was nearing the completion of pastry when he returned in the dusk; he smelt the delicious proof.  Creeping quietly upstairs, he deposited his brushes in an empty attic at the top of the house.  Then he washed his hands with especial care to remove all odour of paint.  And at dinner he endeavoured to put on the mien of innocence.

She was cheerful, but it was the cheerfulness of determined effort.  They naturally talked of the situation.  It appeared that she had a reserve of money in the bank—­as much as would suffice her for quite six months.  He told her with false buoyancy that there need never be the slightest difficulty as to money; he had money, and he could always earn more.

“If you think I’m going to let you go into another situation,” she said, “you’re mistaken.  That’s all.”  And her lips were firm.

This staggered him.  He never could remember for more than half-an-hour at a time that he was a retired valet.  And it was decidedly not her practice to remind him of the fact.  The notion of himself in a situation as valet was half ridiculous and half tragical.  He could no more be a valet than he could be a stockbroker or a wire-walker.