Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/396

THE BETTER SORT ever queer box or tight place Beadel might have found himself, it was something, after all, to have so powerfully interested the public. The insidious artless way in which Bight made his point!—"I don't know that I've ever known the public (and I watch it, as in my trade we have to, day and night) so consummately interested." They had that phenomenon—the present consummate interest—well before them while they sat at their homely meal, served with accessories so different from those of the sweet Chippendale (another chord on which the young man played with just the right effect!) and it would have been hard to say if the guest were, for the first moments, more under the spell of the marvellous "hold" on the town achieved by the great absentee, or of that of the delicious coarse table cloth, the extraordinary form of the saltcellars, and the fact that he had within range of sight, at the other end of the room, in the person of the little quiet man with blue spectacles and an obvious wig, the greatest authority in London about the inner life of the criminal classes. Beadel, none the less, came up again and stayed up—would clearly so have been kept up, had there been need, by their host, that the girl couldn't at last fail to see how much it was for herself that his intention worked. What was it, all the same—since it couldn't be anything so simple as to expose their hapless visitor? What had she to learn about him?—especially at the hour of seeing what there was still to learn about Bight. She ended by deciding—for his appearance bore her out—that his explosion was but the form taken by an inward fever. The fever, on this theory, was the result of the final pang of responsibility. The mystery of Beadel had grown too dark to be borne—which they would presently feel; and he was mean while in the phase of bluffing it off, precisely because it was to overwhelm him.

"And do you mean you too would pay with your 384