“You can’t come in, Eddie,” she said. “How on earth did you get into the house? Please go away. I can’t see you. I can’t, really.” “I’m coming in, I tell you. If you don’t open the door, I’ll smash it. I mean what I say.” “Ingleby—?” the voice muttered. “What the devil has Ingleby to do with you? All right. I’ll go. I’ll chuck the fellow downstairs.” “Oh, don’t . . . please don’t. . . . Let him go quietly.” Griffin unlocked the door. He stood facing Edwin in his shirt-sleeves. Rosie, still dressed, clutched at the mantelpiece. The vein in the middle of Griffin’s forehead bulged with anger. His short neck was flushed. “What the hell—” he began—and then they closed. Edwin’s heel ripped up the corner of the carpet as they swayed together. Suddenly Griffin’s grip slackened. His face blanched, and in a moment Edwin was letting down a sheer weight upon the bed. “What’s the matter?” Rosie screamed, and flung herself beside him. “What’s the matter?” “Good God! . . . He’s gone.” “No . . . No—” she cried. Edwin tore open Griffin’s shirt, listening for an impulse that was not there. “He’s gone,” he said, panting. “He’s dead. . . . Heart. . . . He always had a rocky heart. He’s dead.” The awful word seemed to pull Rosie together. They stared at each other blankly with wide eyes. “Are you sure?” she whispered. “Yes. . . . Of course—” She rose to her feet, speaking in a voice that was quite new to him. “Eddie . . . for God’s sake, go . . . now! . . . quickly!” “I can’t go.” “Go quickly, I tell you. Don’t be a damned little fool. You don’t want to be mixed up in this. Eddie, for God’s sake. . . . It’s ‘natural causes,’ Eddie.” He blundered down the dark stairs and out into the street. He could not walk. He cowered under the warehouse wall opposite, gazing, as though fascinated, at the yellow square of window. The discreet Victorian houses surveyed him as if the horror that the yellow blind concealed were an ordinary occurrence in their dingy lives. They were used to death. And death did not change them. A rubber-tyred hansom rolled smoothly up the Halesby Road, past the mouth of the Place. At the corner, under the gas-lamp, Edwin saw the figure of a policeman with rain shining on his cape. The sight recalled him to a sense of awful possibilities. For the moment he dared not move. He flattened himself against the warehouse walls and did not realise that he was standing directly under the dripping waterspout. In the western sky rose the baleful glare of an uncowled furnace. The policeman strolled away, and Edwin, cautiously emerging, set off through the rain up the Halesby Road towards the hills. He felt that he needed their solitude and darkness. IV