"Well," he said, "for the matter of that, Andrew, the papers are full of the fellow every day, and his goings on. I don't see what news there is in that, it's only just another of his games. Was that all you came up to tell us?" Levison saw the look of scorn that Mimi Addington flashed at the young man. Her own intelligence was infinitely keener; and though Levison had not gone into any details about the arrangements he had made, she saw the significance of the fact in the newspaper immediately. "What a duffer you are, Bally," she said contemptuously. "Why, it's perfectly clear of course. What better place could you have for knocking a Johnny on the head than an East End slum? That's what Andrew means, and that's what he's come to tell us, isn't it, Andrew?" "Your brilliant intellect, assisted by your personal dislike, has at once divined the truth, Mimi," said Levison, leaning back upon the divan and blowing a blue cloud of smoke up towards the hanging Moorish lamp. "Why, then," Lord Ballina broke in suddenly--"why, then, it's this afternoon!" His voice had grown high and thin with excitement, and Levison saw once more a face from which all the color had ebbed, and hands that twitched with sudden realization. Mimi Addington suddenly rose up from her seat with a curiously sinuous and panther-like movement. "This afternoon!" she said. "Then I shall sleep happy this night!" "Oh, come, Mimi," Lord Ballina said, "you needn't go quite so far as that. As a matter of fact, I--er--confound it, I wish we'd let the chap alone!" The woman had sunk back upon the divan. She stretched out one slender, white hand, covered with flashing rings, and patted Levison upon the arm. He shuddered at her touch, scoundrel as he was, but she did not see it. Ballina was walking up and down the room, his feet making no sound upon the thick pile of the carpet. He snapped his fingers in an odd, convulsive fashion. "I say, you know," he said at length, "I really don't like it. I wish to Heaven I'd never been mixed up in the affair. Supposing anything gets out?" "Well, that's supposing me to be rather a bigger fool than I am," Levison answered, though the fear of the other had in some subtle way affected him, and all his own tremors of the morning were beginning to revive. Then there was silence in the room for a time. Although the morning had been bright and cheerful, the sun had become obscured shortly after midday, and a heavy gloom of fog above which thunder had muttered now and then had spread itself high up in the sky. The oppression in the air had become much more marked during the last hour, and now, as the three people sat together, they were all experiencing it to the full. For a long time nobody spoke at all, and when at length Mimi Addington made some casual observation, both the men started involuntarily. The woman's voice also was changed now. It was like the voices of her companions, loaded with sinister apprehension.