A week after Anna had taken up her residence at No. 9, Dorrington Street, Señor Gabriel Dasso, as usual, left the house about eight o'clock. He had seen his fellow-lodger for the first time when he had passed her in the dimness of the stairs that night as he went out.
But the heavily veiled lady conveyed nothing to him at the moment, and the stairs disguised the height, which was so strong a characteristic of Madame Paluda. Dasso had merely raised his hat and passed on.
For some reason a bad mood was upon the ex-dictator of San Pietro. He dined as usual at an exclusive little restaurant in Soho, but his favourite dishes gave him no pleasure, and although he drank twice as much wine as was his custom, the black dog had settled firmly on his back and refused to be dislodged.
The hole-and-corner life he was leading was becoming very wearisome to a man of his tastes, and his long daylight sittings in the little Bloomsbury room were getting sadly on his nerves. As he sat over his coffee and cognac he asked himself whether all this hiding was necessary, after all.
It was only the memory of the man he had seen reading the Imparcial in Paris which had prompted him to this secrecy. After all, it may have been a coincidence. True, the man had also been seen at Dieppe, but perhaps that was another coincidence. He had certainly not embarked on the Arundel with him, and at Newhaven Dasso had noticed nothing suspicious.
No, it was absurd; in the morning he would leave Dorrington Street and take up his residence at some hotel and live a life more fitted to his tastes. Mozara's body, he told himself, would have been burnt out of all recognition in the fire—and ashes tell no tales.
Curiously enough, however, the woman he had passed on the stairs would come unbidden into his mind. Perhaps some turn of the head, some gesture, some mannerism, reminded him of some one he had seen before. Later, as he walked round the promenade of the Empire the memory of the woman on the stairs remained with him. He was drinking heavily to-night, and as he drank the depression he had felt earlier in the evening returned to him tenfold; something seemed to tell him that retribution was on his heels, and little devils hammered at the cells of his brain telling him that his hour had come.
He walked home to Bloomsbury, but the exercise in the night air gave him no relief. He was full of fancies—there were steps behind him—hands stretched out and touched his shoulder. Once he seemed to hear his name called. He cursed softly and told himself that it was nerves. He had no right to coop himself up in these dingy surroundings. It was life he wanted, rich and full.
It was nerves, again, he said, that made him imagine that a bitter taste came into his mouth after he had drank his consommé that night; perhaps that infernal Liz had put too much salt in it.
As he undressed, a curious feeling of lassitude came over him. He forgot his fears, forgot everything but that he wanted to sleep. He sat on the edge of the little bed and fumbled with unhandy fingers with his collar stud, but he did not undo it. With a little sigh his hands dropped nerveless into his lap and he fell back on the shabby eiderdown, his face pale and his breath coming in short, uneven gasps.