It was a cold winter's afternoon; an icy blast tore through the Square and howled round the various corners, so that all the folk whose inclement destinies compelled them to be abroad were hurrying along as if their one desire were to be indoors and by their fires again without loss of time.
Presently my old housekeeper opened the door, and, though I had telegraphed to her from Naples to expect me, pretended to be so overwhelmed with surprise at seeing me as to be incapable of speech for nearly a minute. I managed to get past her at last, however, and went into what, in the days of my practice, had been my consulting room. The fire was burning brightly, my slippers were toasting before it, my writing table was loaded with books and papers as usual, and a comfortable easy chair was drawn up beside it. Everything was exactly as I had left it fourteen months before, even to the paper knife still resting in a half cut book, and a hastily scrawled memo upon the blotting pad. There was something almost ironical about this state of stagnation when I thought of the changes that had occurred in my own life since last I had used that knife and written that memorandum. I told the old housekeeper to let me have my dinner at the usual hour, and having done so, asked her the news of the Square. Her reply was not important.
"James [her husband] an' me, sir," she said, "'ad the rheumatiz at the beginning of the winter, the young postman with the red whiskers 'ave got married to the parlour maid as burnt herself so bad three years back, at number 99, and the little gal with the golden curls across the way fell down the airey and broke her leg two months ago come next Friday."
Such was the chronicle of the most important occurrences in that quiet London Square during my absence.
After dinner I returned to my study, wrote two or three letters, and then drawing my chair up to the fire, sat down to think. Outside the wind howled and the rain dashed against my windows, but my thoughts were very far away from Cavendish Square; they were flying across the seas to an island, where lived a woman whom I had come to love better than all the world. Closing my eyes, I seemed to see the yacht lying in the little harbour under the palm clad hills; I went ashore, threaded my way through the tangled mass of jungle, and passed up the path to the bungalow on the hillside. There I found Alie moving about her rooms with all her old queenly grace; then like a flash the scene changed, and we were back on the yacht's deck in the typhoon. I saw the roaring seas racing down upon us, heard the wind whistling and shrieking through the straining cordage, noticed the broken bulwarks, and by my side, Alie in her oilskins, with her sou-wester drawn tight about her head, clinging to the rail with every atom of her strength. But all that was past and over, and now for twelve months—nay, to be exact, eleven,—I was to be the staid, respectable London householder I had been before I visited the East. After that—but there, what was to happen after that, who could tell?
After a while the termination of my pipe brought my reverie to an end, so I took up a file of papers from the table and fell to scanning the last few numbers. Suddenly a headline caught my eye and rivetted my attention. It was a clipping from a Hong Kong paper, and read as follows:
"THE BEAUTIFUL WHITE DEVIL AGAIN."
"After a silence of something like four months the Beautiful White Devil has again done us the honour of appearing in Eastern waters. On this occasion, however, her polite attentions have been bestowed upon Singapore, from which place she has abducted, with singular cleverness, a young English doctor, whose acquaintance she had made in Batavia, and with him a certain well-known resident by name Ebbington. These two affairs were managed with that dexterity which the Beautiful White Devil has taught us to expect from her, the sequel, however, we have yet to learn. Surely, and we say it for the fiftieth occasion, it is time some definite steps were taken by Government to bring about the capture of a woman who, while being a picturesque and daring enough subject for a novel, has been a continual menace and danger to the commerce of the East for a greater number of years than the editorial chair cares to reckon."
I cut the paragraph out and, having placed it in my pocket-book, turned to the next issue published a week later. Here I found another quarter column devoted to her exploits. This one was also from the Hong Kong paper and ran as follows:
"THE BEAUTIFUL WHITE DEVIL'S LATEST AND GREATEST EXPLOIT."