The Four Corners of the World

by A. E. W. Mason

"It's late," he said. "I'll take the dog out for a run."

He went downstairs and out at the front of the house. To-night the air was mistier, and the moon sailed through a fleece of clouds. Royle walked to a gate on the edge of the hill. It may have been a quarter of an hour before he whistled to the dog and turned back to the house. From the gate to the house was perhaps a hundred yards, and as he walked back first one, then another, of the windows of the library upon the first floor came within his view. These windows stood wide open to the night, and showed him, as in a miniature, this and that corner of the room, the bookcases, the lamps upon the tables, and the top-rails of the chair-backs, small but very clear. The one window which he could not as yet see at all was that in which his wife sat. For it was at the far end of the room and almost over the front door. Royle came within view of it at last, and stopped dead. He gazed at the window with amazement. Ina was still sitting at the writing-table in the window, but she was no longer alone. Just where he himself had stood a few minutes before, a step behind her shoulder, another man was now standing--a man with a strong, rather square, dark face, under a mane of black hair. He wore a dinner-jacket and a black tie, and he was bending forward and talking to Ina very earnestly. Ina herself sat with her hands pressed upon her face and her body huddled in her chair, not answering, but beaten down by the earnestness of the stranger's pleading. Thus they appeared within the frame of the window, both extraordinarily distinct to Royle watching outside there in the darkness. He could see the muscles working in the stranger's face and the twitching of Ina's hands, but he could hear nothing. The man was speaking in too low a voice.

Royle did not move.

"But I know the man," he was saying to himself. "I have seen him, at all events. Where? Where?" And suddenly he remembered. It was at the time of a General Election. He had arrived at King's Cross Station from Scotland late one night, and, walking along the Marylebone Road, he had been attracted by a throng of people standing about a lamp-post, and above the throng the head and shoulders of a man addressing it had been thrown into a clear light. He had stopped for a moment to listen; He had asked a question of his neighbour. Yes, the speaker was one of the candidates, and he was the man who now stood by Ina's side.

Royle tried to remember the name, but he could not. Then he began to wonder whence the stranger had come. It was a good two miles to the village. How, too, had he managed to get into the house? The servants had gone to bed an hour before Royle had come out. The hall-door stood open now. He had left it open. The man must have been waiting some such opportunity--as he had done no doubt last night. Such a passion of anger and jealousy flamed up in Royle as he had never known. He ran into the hall and shot the bolts. He hurried up the stairs and flung open the door. Ina was still sitting at the table, but she had withdrawn her hands from her face, and, but for her, the room was empty.

"Ina!" he cried, and she turned to him. Her face was quiet, her eyes steady; there was a smile upon her lips.

"Yes?"

She sat just as he had left her. Looking at her in his bewilderment, he almost came to believe that his eyes had tricked him, that thus she had sat all this while. Almost! For the violence of his cry had been unmistakable, and she did not ask for the reason of it. He was out of breath, too, his face no doubt disordered; yet she put no question; she sat and smiled--tenderly. Yes, that was the word. Dorman Royle stood in front of her. It seemed to him that his happiness was crumbling down in ruins about him.

"Ina!" he repeated, and the dog barked for admission underneath the window. The current of his thoughts was altered by the sound. His passion fell away from him. It seemed to him that he dived under ice.

"Ina!"