This ghastly business!  Convinced of its reality, he yet could not see it.  The thing existed in his mind, not as a picture, but as a piece of irrefutable evidence.  Larry had not meant to do it, of course.  But it was murder, all the same.  Men like Larry—­weak, impulsive, sentimental, introspective creatures—­did they ever mean what they did?  This man, this Walenn, was, by all accounts, better dead than alive; no need to waste a thought on him!  But, crime—­the ugliness—­Justice unsatisfied!  Crime concealed—­and his own share in the concealment!  And yet—­brother to brother!  Surely no one could demand action from him!  It was only a question of what he was going to advise Larry to do.  To keep silent, and disappear?  Had that a chance of success?  Perhaps if the answers to his questions had been correct.  But this girl!  Suppose the dead man’s relationship to her were ferreted out, could she be relied on not to endanger Larry?  These women were all the same, unstable as water, emotional, shiftless pests of society.  Then, too, a crime untracked, dogging all his brother’s after life; a secret following him wherever he might vanish to; hanging over him, watching for some drunken moment, to slip out of his lips.  It was bad to think of.  A clean breast of it?  But his heart twitched within him.  “Brother of Mr. Keith Darrant, the well-known King’s Counsel”—­visiting a woman of the town, strangling with his bare hands the woman’s husband!  No intention to murder, but—­a dead man!  A dead man carried out of the house, laid under a dark archway!  Provocation!  Recommended to mercy—­penal servitude for life!  Was that the advice he was going to give Larry to-morrow morning?

And he had a sudden vision of shaven men with clay-coloured features, run, as it were, to seed, as he had seen them once in Pentonville, when he had gone there to visit a prisoner.  Larry!  Whom, as a baby creature, he had watched straddling; whom, as a little fellow, he had fagged; whom he had seen through scrapes at college; to whom he had lent money time and again, and time and again admonished in his courses.  Larry!  Five years younger than himself; and committed to his charge by their mother when she died.  To become for life one of those men with faces like diseased plants; with no hair but a bushy stubble; with arrows marked on their yellow clothes!  Larry!  One of those men herded like sheep; at the beck and call of common men!  A gentleman, his own brother, to live that slave’s life, to be ordered here and there, year after year, day in, day out.  Something snapped within him.  He could not give that advice.  Impossible!  But if not, he must make sure of his ground, must verify, must know.  This Glove Lane—­this arch way?  It would not be far from where he was that very moment.  He looked for someone of whom to make enquiry.  A policeman was standing at the corner, his stolid face illumined by a lamp; capable and watchful—­an excellent officer,