When, with new courage, he directed his feet towards the site, upon which he knew there was an old chapel known as Queen's Glasshouse Chapel, whose ownership had slipped from the nerveless hand of a dying sect of dissenters, he could not find the site and he could not see the chapel. For an instant he was perturbed by a horrid suspicion that he had been victimized by a gang of swindlers posing as celebrated persons. Everything was possible in this world and century! None of the people who had appeared in the transaction had resembled his previous conceptions of such people! And confidence-thieves always operated in the grandest hotels! He immediately decided that if the sequel should prove him to be a simpleton and gull, he would at any rate be a silent simpleton and gull. He would stoically bear the loss of two hundred pounds and breathe no word of woe.
But then he remembered with relief that he had genuinely recognized [149] both Rose Euclid and Seven Sachs; and also that Mr. Bryany, among other documents, had furnished him with a photograph of the Chapel and surrounding property. The Chapel therefore existed. He had a plan in his pocket. He now opened this plan and tried to consult it in the middle of the street, but his agitation was such that he could not make out on it which was north and which was south. After he had been nearly prostrated by a taxi-cab, a policeman came up to him and said, with all the friendly disdain of a London policeman addressing a provincial:
"Safer to look at that on the pavement, sir!"
Edward Henry glanced up from the plan.
"I was trying to find the Queen's Glasshouse Chapel, officer," said he. "Have you ever heard of it?"
(In Bursley, members of the Town Council always flattered members of the Force by addressing them as "officer"; and Edward Henry knew exactly the effective intonation.)
"It was there, sir," said the policeman, less disdainful, pointing to a narrow hoarding behind which could be seen the back-walls of high buildings in Shaftesbury Avenue. "They've just finished pulling it down."
"Thank you," said Edward Henry, quietly, with a superb and successful effort to keep as much colour in his face as if the policeman had not dealt him a dizzying blow.
He then walked towards the hoarding, but could scarcely feel the ground under his feet. From a wide aperture in the palisades a cart full of earth was emerging; it creaked and shook as it was dragged by [150] a labouring horse over loose planks into the roadway; a whip-cracking carter hovered on its flank. Edward Henry approached the aperture and gazed within. An elegant young man stood solitary inside the hoarding and stared at a razed expanse of land in whose furthest corner some navvies were digging a hole....
The site!