THE ENCOUNTER AT MIDHURST
overhead, save for a couple of yellow stars, had the sky to herself.
At first his thoughts were kinetic, of deeds and not relationships. There was this malefactor, and his victim, and it had fallen on Mr. Hoopdriver to take a hand in the game. He was married. Did she know he was married? Never for a moment did a thought of evil concerning her cross Hoopdriver's mind. Simple-minded people see questions of morals so much better than superior persons—who have read and thought themselves complex to impotence. He had heard her voice, seen the frank light in her eyes, and she had been weeping—that sufficed. The rights of the case he hadn't properly grasped. But he would. And that smirking—well, swine was the mildest for him. He recalled the exceedingly unpleasant incident of the railway bridge. "Thin we won't detain yer, thenks," said Mr. Hoopdriver aloud, in a strange, unnatural, contemptible voice, supposed to represent that of Bechamel. "Oh, the beggar! I'll be level with him yet. He's afraid of us detectives—that I'll swear." (If Mrs. Wardor should chance to be on the other side of the door within earshot, well and good.)
For a space he meditated chastisements and revenges, physical impossibilities for the most part,—Bechamel staggering headlong from the impact of Mr. Hoopdriver's large but, to tell the truth, ill-supported fist, Bechamel's five feet nine of height lifted from the ground and quivering under a vigorously applied horsewhip. So pleasant was such dreaming, that Mr. Hoopdriver's peaked face under the moonlight was transfigured. One might have paired him
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