Part 4 (1/2)

'Everyone's whispering,' said Albert Shawn, gazing carefully at his boots, 'that Mr. Hugo has taken a kind of a fancy to Miss Payne.'

Hugo restrained himself.

'Heavens!' he exclaimed, with a clever affectation of lightness, 'what next? I've only spoken to the chit once.'

'Don't I know it, sir!'

'Enough of that! What have you to report?'

'Miss Payne left at 2.15, whipped round to the flats entrance, took the lift to the top-floor, went into Mr. Francis Tudor's flat.'

'What's that you say? Whose flat?' cried Hugo.

'Mr. Francis Tudor's, sir.'

Mr. Tudor was famous as the tenant of the suite rented at two thousand a year; he had a reputation for being artistic, sybaritic, and something in the inner ring of the City.

'Ah!' said Hugo. 'Perhaps she is a friend of one of Mr. Tudor's--'

'Servants,' he was about to say, but the idea of Miss Payne being on terms of equality with a menial was not pleasant to him, and he stopped.

'No, sir,' said Albert Shawn, unmoved. 'She is not, because Mr. Tudor shunted out all his servants soon afterwards. Miss Payne was shown into his study. She had her tea there, and her dinner. The Hugo half-guinea dinner was ordered late by telephone for two persons, and rushed up at eight o'clock.'

'I wonder Mr. Tudor didn't order an orchestra with the dinner,' said Hugo grimly. It was a sublime effort on his part to be his natural self.

'I waited for Miss Payne to leave,' continued Albert Shawn. 'That's why I'm so late.'

'And what time did she leave?'

'She hasn't left,' said Albert Shawn.

CHAPTER IV

CAMILLA

Hugo dismissed Albert, with orders to continue his vigil, and then he rang for Simon.

'Do you think I might have some tea?' he asked.

'I am disposed to think you might, sir,' said Simon the cellarer. 'It is eight days since you indulged after dinner.'

'Bring me one cup, then, poured out.'

He was profoundly disturbed by Albert's news. He was, in fact, miserable. He had a physical pain in the region of the heart. He wished he could step off Love as one steps off an omnibus, but he found that Love resembled an express train more than an omnibus.

'Can she be secretly married to him?' he demanded half aloud, sipping at the tea.

The idea soothed him exactly as much as it alarmed him.

'The question is,' he murmured angrily, 'am I or am I not an a.s.s?... At my age!'