Edgar had things to be seen to in Brayton that afternoon. It was true that his presence there or personal interviews were not necessary, but in this hell of fears and suspicion and suspense he wanted and longed for employment. There were so few days to be got through; could he but hold himself in hand till he and Lucia were safely off from Victoria, speeding South, alone and together, he felt that some certainty would come. He tried by business and employment to root out from his mind the crooked course that had already indicated itself, that had done more than that, and had insisted on its being the only satisfactory course. And it was his very best self—the best self, too, of which any man is capable—that tried to scare away the bat-like shapes that hovered round him by refusing to allow his mind to recognize their existence. He wanted to do anything rather than be at leisure to perceive them. Whatever else was foul or fair, they were foul. Foul he had been in entertaining them, in being at leisure to receive them all these weeks, and now that they suggested a practical plan, he could at least refuse to give it consideration. Only a few hours ago he had longed for certainty at whatever cost; now, when the definite idea of testing his suspicion of the empty house occurred to him as practically and reasonably possible, he tried to put it away. Already he had strayed far; how much better to have gone with Lucia to Ashdown, and left the damned photographic apparatus to be in order or not, just as it pleased. Yet for a while his suspicions had been at rest when Charlie himself announced as a new plan that he would not go to Ashdown, but stop in town with Maud. Or had suspicion ever been wholly at rest? Had he not instantly connected Charlie's presence in town with the empty house?
The rows of well-ordered villas streamed by him. There was Holywell and Holyrood, and Laburnums and Cedars, all with their inhabitants, all with their possibilities of tragedy or rapture, all so much smaller than himself as regards that which the world recognizes as the possibilities of life, but all quite as large as he, to say the least, as regards the possibilities of those things which make life a thing that is raised just a little higher than existence. He had meant—Lucia had ardently backed his desire—to turn some sort of cultured sun on to these suburbanly provincial residences, to speak to them of fireworks and Botticelli, and God knows what. But what if, after all, the majority of these decayed and effete old ladies and gentlemen possessed that which he now found he prized above all else and had missed? What if in the
