“He has courage,” Wilmore declared. “He has also a very beautiful companion. Were you serious, Francis, when you told me that that was his wife?”
“She herself was my informant,” was the quiet reply.
Wilmore was puzzled.
“But she passed you just now without even a glance of recognition, and I thought you told me at the club this afternoon that all your knowledge of his evil ways came from her. Besides, she looks at least twenty years younger than he does.”
Francis, who had been watching his glass filled with champagne, raised it to his lips and drank its contents steadily to the last drop.
“I can only tell you what I know, Andrew,” he said, as he set down the empty glass. “The woman who is with him now is the woman who spoke to me outside the Old Bailey this afternoon. We went to a tea-shop together. She told me the story of his career. I have never listened to so horrible a recital in my life.”
“And yet they are here together, dining tete-a-tete, on a night when it must have needed more than ordinary courage for either of them to have been seen in public at all,” Wilmore pointed out.
“It is as astounding to me as it is to you,” Francis confessed. “From the way she spoke, I should never have dreamed that they were living together.”
“And from his appearance,” Wilmore remarked, as he called the waiter to bring some cigarettes, “I should never have imagined that he was anything else save a high-principled, well-born, straightforward sort of chap. I never saw a less criminal type of face.”
They each in turn glanced at the subject of their discussion. Oliver Hilditch's good-looks had been the subject of many press comments during the last few days. They were certainly undeniable. His face was a little lined but his hair was thick and brown. His features were regular, his forehead high and thoughtful, his mouth a trifle thin but straight and shapely. Francis gazed at him like a man entranced. The hours seemed to have slipped away. He was back in the tea-shop, listening to the woman who spoke of terrible things. He felt again his shivering abhorrence of her cold, clearly narrated story. Again he shrank from the horrors from which with merciless fingers she had stripped the coverings. He seemed to see once more the agony in her white face, to hear the eternal pain aching and throbbing in her monotonous tone. He rose suddenly to his feet.