"But I shan't give evidence. I've told Oxford I'll have nothing to do with it at all."
"Suppose they make you? They can, you know, with a sub--sub something, I forget its name. Then you'll have to go in the witness-box."
"Me in the witness-box!" he murmured, undone.
"Yes," she said. "I expect it'll be very provoking indeed. But you'd want a new suit for it. So I'm glad you ordered one. When are you going to try on?"
[CHAPTER XI]
An Escape
One night, in the following June, Priam and Alice refrained from going to bed. Alice dozed for an hour or so on the sofa, and Priam read by her side in an easy-chair, and about two o'clock, just before the first beginnings of dawn, they stimulated themselves into a feverish activity beneath the parlour gas. Alice prepared tea, bread-and-butter, and eggs, passing briskly from room to room. Alice also ran upstairs, cast a few more things into a valise and a bag already partially packed, and, locking both receptacles, carried them downstairs. Meantime the whole of Priam's energy was employed in having a bath and in shaving. Blood was shed, as was but natural at that ineffable hour. While Priam consumed the food she had prepared, Alice was continually darting to and fro in the house. At one moment, after an absence, she would come into the parlour with a mouthful of hatpins; at another she would rush out to assure herself that the indispensable keys of the valise and bag with her purse were on the umbrella-stand, where they could not be forgotten. Between her excursions she would drink thirty drops of tea.
"Now, Priam," she said at length, "the water's hot. Haven't you finished? It'll be getting light soon."
"Water hot?" he queried, at a loss.