And looking straight at the carpet in front of him, Robert Grimshaw remembered the March night that had ever since weighed so heavily on them all. He had dined alone at his club. He had sat talking to three elderly men, and, following his custom, at a quarter past eleven he had set out to walk up Piccadilly and round the acute angle of Regent Street. Usually he walked down Oxford Street, down Park Lane; and so, having taken his breath of air and circumnavigated, as it were, the little island of wealth that those four streets encompass, he would lay himself tranquilly in his white bed, and with Peter on a chair beside his feet, he would fall asleep. But on that night, whilst he walked slowly, his stick behind his back, he had been almost thrown down by Etta Stackpole, who appeared to fall right under his feet, and she was followed by the tall form of Dudley Leicester, whose face Grimshaw recognized as he looked up to pay the cabman. Having, as one does on the occasion of such encounters, with a military precision and an extreme swiftness turned on his heels--having turned indeed so swiftly that his stick, which was behind his back, swung out centrifugally and lightly struck Etta Stackpole’s skirt, he proceeded to walk home in a direction the reverse of his ordinary one. And at first he thought absolutely nothing at all. The night was cold and brilliant, and he peeped, as was his wont, curiously and swiftly into the faces of the passers-by. Just about abreast of Burlington House he ejaculated: “That sly cat!” as if he were lost in surprised admiration for Dudley Leicester’s enterprise. But opposite the Ritz he began to shiver. “I must have taken a chill,” he said, but actually there had come into his mind the thought--the thought that Etta Stackpole afterwards so furiously upbraided him for--that Dudley Leicester must have been carrying on a long intrigue with Etta Stackpole. “And I’ve married Pauline to that scoundrel!” he muttered, for it seemed to him that Dudley Leicester must have been a scoundrel, if he could so play fast and loose, if he could do it so skilfully as to take in himself, whilst appearing so open about it. And then Grimshaw shrugged his shoulders: “Well, it’s no business of mine,” he said. He quickened his pace, and walked home to bed; but he was utterly unable to sleep.