He smiled again, for it occurred to him that his risk was the greater.
“Two millions!” he murmured. “It is worth it: I could do a great deal with two millions.”
He got down at his club, and tendered the cabman the legal fare to a penny.
CHAPTER XI
THE QUEST OF THE BOOK
When Piccadilly Circus, a blaze of light, was thronged with the crowds that the theaters were discharging, a motor-car came gingerly through the traffic, passed down Regent Street, and swinging along Pall Mall, headed southward across Westminster Bridge.
The rain had ceased, but underfoot the roads were sodden, and the car bespattered its occupants with black mud.
The chauffeur at the wheel turned as the car ran smoothly along the tramway lines in the Old Kent Road and asked a question, and one of the two men in the back of the car consulted the other.
“We will go to Cramer’s first,” said the man.
Old Kent Road was a fleeting vision of closed shops, of little knots of men emerging from public-houses at the potman’s strident command; Lewisham High Road, as befits that very respectable thoroughfare, was decorously sleeping; Lea, where the hedges begin, was silent; and Chislehurst was a place of the dead.
Near the common the car pulled up at a big house standing in black quietude, and the two occupants of the car descended and passed through the stiff gate, along the graveled path, and came to a stop at the broad porch.