‘Don’t you know,’ he said bitterly, ‘that when a man loves a woman he wants everything, everything about her, and that the only burden to him is to feel that she’s keeping—’

‘Stop!’ she cried suddenly. They looked at each other, baffled and inquiring.

‘Take me away from here, Charles. Anywhere, I don’t care. We’ll go to an hotel if you like.’

Moving towards the door, he felt, and knew that she felt, that they were running away, hard, in panic, from something that they had never seen or heard, and about which they knew only that it was terrible.

The evening had that sudden chill dampness that the end of May will sometimes produce; a cold, salty wind blew from the sea. Charles had no overcoat with him, and he shivered continually in his thin jacket as he paced between the bleak, ugly sheds. The cold was, in fact, more present to his mind than the nervous demands of the situation—demands which, but for the immunity accorded him by his demented state, would have been considerable, for that evening there was a ‘job’ to be done. They were to assemble, with trade-plates at the ready, for an unusually large consignment.

All this was, to him, a surprise in itself. For about three weeks, neither Bunder nor anyone else had mentioned such matters in his hearing. He had not even known, and had been scrupulous in doing nothing to find out, whether there were any ‘jobs’ going on. It was, for one thing, by no means certain that he would be used any more after the débâcle over Dogson; and in any case, probably, an interval would have to elapse in which he could be watched to see if any of his activities indicated danger or treachery. With complete fatalism he had even faced, at odd moments, the possibility of being murdered: Bunder’s ‘the rest of us have got to be protected’ certainly contained a clear hint of it; but he had taken no steps to safeguard himself. As for leaving his job, it was obviously out of the question. His one chance of safety was to stay where he could be watched until suspicion died away; in any case, what else could he do? Even as it was, he was beginning to find himself short of money after three weeks on his bare wages. And then, without fuss, and with no indication that anything had happened since their last assignment, Bunder had quietly given him his instructions, just before setting out that morning.