Page:When It Was Dark.djvu/272

252 "Don't be alarmed, Llwellyn. We are perfectly safe in every way. Only the man is an enemy of mine, and even small enemies are obnoxious. He won't disturb either of us for long."

The big man gave a sigh of relief. "Well, you manage as you think best," he said. "Confound him! He deserves all he gets — let's change the subject. It's a little too Adelphi-like to be amusing."

"I am going to hear Pachmann in the St. James's Hall. Will you come?"

Llwellyn considered a moment. "No, I don't think I will. I'm going out to a supper-party in St. John's Wood later — Charlie Fitzgerald's, the lessee of the Piccadilly. I shall go home and read a novel quietly. To tell the truth, I feel rather depressed, too. Everything seems going too well, doesn't it?"

Schuabe's voice shook a little as he replied shortly.

For a brief moment the veil was raised. Each saw the other with eyes full of the fear that was lurking within them.

For weeks they had been at cross purposes, simulating a courage and indifference they did not feel. Now each knew the truth.

They knew that the burden of their terrible secret was beginning to press and enclose them with its awful weight. Each had imagined the other free from his own terror, that terror that lifts up its head in times of night and silence, the dread Incubus that murders sleep. The two men went out of the club together without speaking. Their hearts were beating like drums within them; it was the beginning of the agony.

Llwellyn, his coat exchanged for a smoking jacket, lay back in a leather chair in his library. Since his return from Palestine he had transferred most of his