In the days that followed, we seemed to have caught up into our own apparently uneventful lives something of that spirit of waiting drama which pervaded the teeming town and the smoke-stained countryside. The people all seemed to be waiting for something. We, too, waited, and in the meantime Creslin made free use of our sitting room, drove out with us in the car which I had hired for a week, and never failed to attend our performances. Our sitting room was almost a bower of roses and orchids, flowers which arrived in mysterious parcels from London and which must have cost a small fortune. I ventured to protest on the grounds of political economy, but Creslin only smiled. "Every man is allowed one extravagance in life," he said. "You and your friend, for instance, drink wine and whisky and soda and smoke cigars. I do neither. My weakness lies elsewhere." He glanced across at Rose as he spoke, and at the expression in his eyes, the slow, amorous, calculating expression, I had to grip the sides of my chair and look down at the carpet towards some spilt tobacco ash, to hide my fury. Creslin, who had been strolling uneasily around the room, seated himself on the sofa by Rose's side. "You love flowers, Miss Mindel?" he asked softly, following the direction of her eyes, which were resting upon a bowl of red roses. "I adore them," she acknowledged, "for their own sake--and sometimes, too," she went on, meeting his gaze with a coquetry for which I could never have given her credit, "sometimes, too, for the sake of those from whom they come." He glanced almost imperceptibly towards Leonard and myself, one of those slow, inimical glances which seemed yet to betray some evil purpose. Bearing in mind the stories which one had been told of this man's cold-blooded and indiscriminate cruelty, it was easy to believe that if a word from him could have wiped us off the face of the earth at that moment, it would certainly have been spoken. Making the best of our presence, however, he continued his conversation in a low tone. Once I saw Rose flinch and glance up as though in distress. I came across the room, making a pretence at filling my pipe from a jar which stood upon a table near them. Creslin looked at me through his half-closed eyes. "Miss Mindel does not approve of the coming emancipation of her sex," he observed. "I suppose the doctrines of the new world must sound strange at first to those who have counted the hard and fast chastity of the Puritan amongst the virtues." "What are the doctrines of the new world?" I enquired. "They include, at any rate," he replied, in his quiet, sibilant voice, "a complete reconstruction of the relations between man and woman." "That sounds like Bolshevism, pure and simple," Leonard remarked bluntly. "The actual principles of Bolshevism," Creslin asserted, "contain more than a germ of the truth."