The crime doctor gave her another of his oblique smiles.
"I shall be all the better able to watch Scarth's latest move," he said.
II
Over against the back windows of a nice new street of tall red houses, beyond the high red wall enclosing their common strip of shrubs and gravel, runs a humbler row of windows in connection with a mews. In one you may still catch a coachman shaving for the box, but more likely a chauffeur's lady engrossed in her novelette; and on the next sill are pots of geraniums, while the next but one keeps the evening's kippers nice and fresh. Most of the windows have muslin curtains, and in some the lights are on all night. Last October there was only one without any kind of covering, except a newspaper stuck across a broken pane.
It was the scandal of the row; a battered billycock lay rotting on the roof above; strange fragments of song were always liable to burst from within, as of a gentleman roistering in his sleep, and at times a bristly countenance would roll red eyes over the backs of the red houses, beginning and ending with the flats at the bottom of the street. If a dark handsome face appeared simultaneously at a top flat window, the chances were that both would vanish, but it would have been difficult to detect the exchange of actual signals.
On the return of Alfred Croucher, shaven and collared, from the audience in Welbeck Street, he went so far as to wink and wave from the window that disgraced the mews to the one that crowned the flats. His rolling eyes still had their whites about them; his wrists were still in unaccustomed cuffs; and Mostyn Scarth was at his elbow before it could be lifted with the bottle brought in to celebrate the occasion.
"Just one!" said Croucher, pitching his mongrel whine in the key of comic extravaganza. "I deserve all ten fingers for what I got to tell yer!"
"Not a drop, my Lazarus!" said Scarth. "When do you move in?"
"To-day—now."
"You shall have the whole bottle when you come out. You may want it. What about that stamped note-paper?"