Now that he had seen this dark, deserted spot, the chances seemed to him much better.  “Pockets inside out!” Either Larry had had presence of mind to do a very clever thing, or someone had been at the body before the police found it.  That was the more likely.  A dead backwater of a place.  At three o’clock—­loneliest of all hours—­Larry’s five minutes’ grim excursion to and fro might well have passed unseen!  Now, it all depended on the girl; on whether Laurence had been seen coming to her or going away; on whether, if the man’s relationship to her were discovered, she could be relied on to say nothing.  There was not a soul in Borrow Street now; hardly even a lighted window; and he took one of those rather desperate decisions only possible to men daily accustomed to the instant taking of responsibility.  He would go to her, and see for himself.  He came to the door of Forty-two, obviously one of those which are only shut at night, and tried the larger key.  It fitted, and he was in a gas-lighted passage, with an oil-clothed floor, and a single door to his left.  He stood there undecided.  She must be made to understand that he knew everything.  She must not be told more than that he was a friend of Larry’s.  She must not be frightened, yet must be forced to give her very soul away.  A hostile witness—­not to be treated as hostile—­a matter for delicate handling!  But his knock was not answered.

Should he give up this nerve-racking, bizarre effort to come at a basis of judgment; go away, and just tell Laurence that he could not advise him?  And then—­what?  Something must be done.  He knocked again.  Still no answer.  And with that impatience of being thwarted, natural to him, and fostered to the full by the conditions of his life, he tried the other key.  It worked, and he opened the door.  Inside all was dark, but a voice from some way off, with a sort of breathless relief in its foreign tones, said: 

“Oh! then it’s you, Larry!  Why did you knock?  I was so frightened.  Turn up the light, dear.  Come in!”

Feeling by the door for a switch in the pitch blackness he was conscious of arms round his neck, a warm thinly clad body pressed to his own; then withdrawn as quickly, with a gasp, and the most awful terror-stricken whisper: 

“Oh!  Who is it?”

With a glacial shiver down his own spine, Keith answered

“A friend of Laurence.  Don’t be frightened!”

There was such silence that he could hear a clock ticking, and the sound of his own hand passing over the surface of the wall, trying to find the switch.  He found it, and in the light which leaped up he saw, stiffened against a dark curtain evidently screening off a bedroom, a girl standing, holding a long black coat together at her throat, so that her face with its pale brown hair, short and square-cut and curling up underneath, had an uncanny look of being detached from any body.  Her face was so alabaster pale that the staring, startled eyes, dark blue or brown, and the faint rose of the parted lips, were like colour stainings on a white mask; and it had a strange delicacy, truth, and pathos, such as only suffering brings.  Though not susceptible to aesthetic emotion, Keith was curiously affected.  He said gently: