Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/200

188 syllable which would point to their existence. People do not want shivery-shakery fools for lawyers. These two young women knew as much—and as little—about the house as I did. If they chose to live in it, let them. It was their affair, not mine. They plainly regarded the prospective tenancy as an excellent jest. I tried to persuade myself that I had no doubt whatever that that was just what they would find it.

So they entered into the occupation of No. 84 Camford Street. I went with them and saw them enter. It was a curious process, that of entry; an unreasonably, unnaturally curious process. It should be necessary to enter no honest house like that. The first step suggested, possibly, that something unsavoury was concealed within, which it was necessary, at all and any cost, to keep hidden from the light of day.

When they were in, and the door was closed, and they had gone from sight, an icy finger seemed to be pressed against my spine. I shivered as with cold. An almost irresistible longing possessed me to batter at the door and compel them to come out. But I had not sufficient courage to write myself down an ass.

Instead, I rode home in the cab which had brought us to the house to which I had taken so cordial a disrelish, oppressed by a sense of horrible foreboding which weighed upon my brain nearly to the point of stupefaction.

“Before I go to bed to-night,” I told myself, “I’ll take a dozen of somebody or other’s antibilious pills. I had no idea I was so liverish.”