“We’ll go on about money matters as we have been going.  I trust to you not to run me into overwhelming debts.  And, of course, if at any time, you do want to marry—­on account of children or anything—­ if nobody knows of this conversation we can be divorced then. . . .”

Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda gathered her forces for her last appeal.

It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down before him and clung to his knees.  He struggled ridiculously to get himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.

She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet without.  He had come back.  The door reopened.  There was a slight pause, and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second housemaid.  There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than any words.

The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of the door.

“Damn!” said Amanda.

Then slowly she rose to her knees.

She meditated through vast moments.

“It’s a cursed thing to be a woman,” said Amanda.  She stood up.  She put her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.  After another long interval of thought she spoke.

“Cheetah!” she said, “Old Cheetah! . . .

“I didn’t think it of you. . . .”

Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.

30

The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham’s private processes the morning after this affair.

Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London.  She had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way.  On the morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in the night, and almost immediately she was summoned to see Benham.

He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little obscure the condition of the room behind him.  He was carefully dressed, and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever.  But one of his hands was tied up in a white bandage.

“I am going this morning,” he said, “I am going down now to breakfast.  I have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and I have cut my hand.  I want you to tell the manager and see that they are properly charged for on the bill. . . .  Thank you.”