"You are most courteous," he acknowledged. "I am going to my room for a few minutes. Afterwards I shall venture to intrude."
The two men left the room, followed a few minutes later by Rastall, in hot haste for the telegraph office. Leonard's expression, as he looked at me, was almost of horror. Rose, too, seemed troubled.
"What on earth do you mean, Maurice," she exclaimed, "by asking us even to breathe the same air as that hateful person?"
I thrust Leonard into a chair by Rose's side and stood on the shabby little bit of hearth rug, close to them.
"The time has come," I said, addressing myself particularly to Rose, "for me to pass on to you the chief's instructions."
In the days that followed, we seemed to have caught up into our own apparently uneventful lives something of that spirit of waiting drama which pervaded the teeming town and the smoke-stained countryside. The people all seemed to be waiting for something. We, too, waited, and in the meantime Creslin made free use of our sitting room, drove out with us in the car which I had hired for a week, and never failed to attend our performances. Our sitting room was almost a bower of roses and orchids, flowers which arrived in mysterious parcels from London and which must have cost a small fortune. I ventured to protest on the grounds of political economy, but Creslin only smiled.
"Every man is allowed one extravagance in life," he said. "You and your friend, for instance, drink wine and whisky and soda and smoke cigars. I do neither. My weakness lies elsewhere."
He glanced across at Rose as he spoke, and at the expression in his eyes, the slow, amorous, calculating expression, I had to grip the sides of my chair and look down at the carpet towards some spilt tobacco ash, to hide my fury. Creslin, who had been strolling uneasily around the room, seated himself on the sofa by Rose's side.
"You love flowers, Miss Mindel?" he asked softly, following the direction of her eyes, which were resting upon a bowl of red roses.