Mr. Jetsam turned, and in the same second he dropped the match. The room was in darkness. Then followed a crash of glass and splintering of wood, and then a heavy fall in the apartment itself. With some trouble, Carpentaria found the electric switch and turned on the light. Mrs. Ilam’s lips were still trembling in a vain effort to speak. Her son lay stretched and whimpering at her feet. Mr. Jetsam had vanished. The window was in ruins.
Dr. Rivers appeared. He had bandaged his forehead.
“She is paralysed!” said the doctor, when he had examined Mrs. Ilam. “She will never again have the use of her limbs or her organs of speech. She will be able to see and to hear, that’s all.”
PART II—THE TWINS
CHAPTER XIV—Entry of the Twins
It is a singular fact that the secondary stage of the drama which I am relating was tremendously, vitally, influenced by the marriage of Mr. Luke Shooter, junior partner in Shooter’s, a firm of wholesale ribbon merchants in Cannon Street. Luke Shooter did not know it. Luke Shooter had nothing whatever to do with the drama; it is very, probable that he never even heard of it, except such trifling fragments as got into the newspapers. Nevertheless, by the mere fact of marrying, Luke Shooter unconsciously changed the course of events in the City of Pleasure. For he was a man of broad views, and he liked people to think well of him, and so it occurred that, at his suggestion, the multitudinous staff of Shooter’s was given a complete holiday on the day of his marriage, and that day happened to be Tuesday, May 4.