“I am going now,” he said.  “Remember!  He mustn’t come here; you mustn’t go to him.  I shall see him to-morrow.  If you are as fond of him as you say—­take care, take care!”

She sighed out, “Yes! oh, yes!” and Keith went to the door.  She was standing with her back to the wall, and to follow him she only moved her head—­that dove-like face with all its life in eyes which seemed saying:  ‘Look into us; nothing we hide; all—­all is there!’

And he went out.

In the passage he paused before opening the outer door.  He did not want to meet that policeman again; the fellow’s round should have taken him well out of the street by now, and turning the handle cautiously, he looked out.  No one in sight.  He stood a moment, wondering if he should turn to right or left, then briskly crossed the street.  A voice to his right hand said: 

“Good-night, sir.”

There in the shadow of a doorway the policeman was standing.  The fellow must have seen him coming out!  Utterly unable to restrain a start, and muttering “Goodnight!” Keith walked on rapidly: 

He went full quarter of a mile before he lost that startled and uneasy feeling in sardonic exasperation that he, Keith Darrant, had been taken for a frequenter of a lady of the town.  The whole thing—­the whole thing!—­a vile and disgusting business!  His very mind felt dirty and breathless; his spirit, drawn out of sheath, had slowly to slide back before he could at all focus and readjust his reasoning faculty.  Certainly, he had got the knowledge he wanted.  There was less danger than he thought.  That girl’s eyes!  No mistaking her devotion.  She would not give Larry away.  Yes!  Larry must clear out—­South America—­the East—­it did not matter.  But he felt no relief.  The cheap, tawdry room had wrapped itself round his fancy with its atmosphere of murky love, with the feeling it inspired, of emotion caged within those yellowish walls and the red stuff of its furniture.  That girl’s face!  Devotion; truth, too, and beauty, rare and moving, in its setting of darkness and horror, in that nest of vice and of disorder!...  The dark archway; the street arab, with his gleeful:  “They ’ain’t got ’im yet!”; the feel of those bare arms round his neck; that whisper of horror in the darkness; above all, again, her child face looking into his, so truthful!  And suddenly he stood quite still in the street.  What in God’s name was he about?  What grotesque juggling amongst shadows, what strange and ghastly eccentricity was all this?  The forces of order and routine, all the actualities of his daily life, marched on him at that moment, and swept everything before them.  It was a dream, a nightmare not real!  It was ridiculous!  That he—­he should thus be bound up with things so black and bizarre!