He looked at her for a moment before replying.  She was wearing black, but scarcely the black of a woman who sorrows.  She was still frigidly beautiful, redolent, in all the details of her toilette, of that almost negative perfection which he had learnt to expect from her.  She suggested to him still that same sense of aloofness from the actualities of life.

“I prefer not to believe that it is ended,” he protested.  “Have you so many friends that you have no room for one who has never consciously done you any harm?”

She looked at him with some faint curiosity in her immobile features.

“Harm?  No!  On the contrary, I suppose I ought to thank you for your evidence at the inquest.”

“Some part of it was the truth,” he replied.

“I suppose so,” she admitted drily.  “You told it very cleverly.”

He looked her in the eyes.

“My profession helped me to be a good witness,” he said.  “As for the gist of my evidence, that was between my conscience and myself.”

“Your conscience?” she repeated.  “Are there really men who possess such things?”

“I hope you will discover that for yourself some day,” he answered.  “Tell me your plans?  Where are you living?”

“For the present with my father in Curzon Street.”

“With Sir Timothy Brast?”

She assented.

“You know him?” she asked indifferently.

“Very slightly,” Francis replied.  “We talked together, some nights ago, at Soto’s Restaurant.  I am afraid that I did not make a very favourable impression upon him.  I gathered, too, that he has somewhat eccentric tastes.”

“I do not see a great deal of my father,” she said.  “We met, a few months ago, for the first time since my marriage, and things have been a little difficult between us—­just at first.  He really scarcely ever puts in an appearance at Curzon Street.  I dare say you have heard that he makes a hobby of an amazing country house which he has down the river.”

“The Walled House?” he ventured.

She nodded.

“I see you have heard of it.  All London, they tell me, gossips about the entertainments there.”

“Are they really so wonderful?” he asked.

“I have never been to one,” she replied.  “As a matter of fact, I have spent scarcely any time in England since my marriage.  My husband, as I remember he told you, was fond of travelling.”

Notwithstanding the warm spring air he was conscious of a certain chilliness.  Her level, indifferent tone seemed to him almost abnormally callous.  A horrible realisation flashed for a moment in his brain.  She was speaking of the man whom she had killed!

“Your father overheard a remark of mine,” Francis told her.  “I was at Soto’s with a friend—­Andrew Wilmore, the novelist—­and to tell you the truth we were speaking of the shock I experienced when I realised that I had been devoting every effort of which I was capable, to saving the life of—­shall we say a criminal?  Your father heard me say, in rather a flamboyant manner, perhaps, that in future I declared war against all crime and all criminals.”