About noon, he arrived at the docks, and joined the others outside the entrance to the appropriate berth. While they waited for the official routine to complete itself, the drivers clustered together by the gate, smoking and talking; Bunder, who seemed in high spirits, was telling a story which the others punctuated, as Charles approached, with bursts of laughter. Jack Simons, his grey cloth cap set straight on the top of his head, leaned against the wall a few yards away from the others. Bunder’s particular cronies avoided, rather too carefully, the appearance of forming a group among themselves; they took pains not to stand next to one another or begin any private discussion. They were all, undeniably, glad that there was no ‘job’ on to-day. Bunder had received no word of a consignment to be picked up, and they were free to come and go like honest men. For himself, Charles reflected, he cared very little. His life had so long ceased to move to the ordinary rhythms at all; his happiness was concentrated absolutely in his dealings with Veronica, and the effect was to blot out the concept of guilt from his mind altogether. With it, sur­prisingly, went his fear. Although detection and arrest would lead immediately to the only evil he was still able to imagine—separation from Veronica —he had so completely accepted the fact that only his crime made her accessible to him, that his terrors had been laid to sleep as under an anæsthetic. He did not share the terrible nerve-shaking that the others, even Bunder, so mani­festly underwent. It was another example of the fantastic narrowing of his mind. One idea possessed it utterly, and his obsession gave him all the strength and obstinacy he needed.

He leaned against the wall. Only one thing troubled him, and that was the possibility—indeed, certainty—that the journalist was about somewhere. He glanced about, irritably, but there was no sign of the fanatic or of his motor-cycle.

Simons broke into his thoughts with some question about the morning’s run. Charles answered perfunctorily, and Simons resumed his silence. He seldom spoke to Charles nowadays, being shrewd enough to see, in spite of all the precautions Charles took, that his warning not to associate with Bunder had been dis­regarded. When their eyes chanced to meet, the older man’s had a directly reproachful look in them; however little he wished to show it—for it was obviously his policy to meddle no farther in the matter—his own honesty, brought into contact with this duplicity, sparked into something like accusation. Charles, who in his pre-Oak Lounge days would have been desperately troubled by the disapprobation of such a man, was now totally indifferent to it, when he noticed it at all.

‘All right, come on out of it,’ said a voice, loudly but with a kind of forbearance in its tone. Everyone turned in surprise.