"By gad!" he exclaimed half under his breath. "She really pulled the trigger. Why didn't he tell you to push the safety catch up first?"
She had fallen back in the arm-chair, quite beaten and crying.
"Have mercy on me, Bryan!"
"Oh, yes! I'll have mercy. I'm going into the library to collect my own thoughts. I'll leave you here for a quarter of an hour. You can do a lot of thinking in that time. All I've offered you stands. If you make up your mind quicker than you expected, just knock at the door or call me."
He opened the door of the inner room, looked at her for a few moments, checked a sudden movement either of ruth or passion, and closed it behind him. She heard him drag a chair along the floor and sit down.
Left alone, she looked quickly round her for a means of escape. The windows were not bolted. She opened one, trembling at the slight noise it made, and looked out. The street was twenty feet below her. Empty asphalt stretched left and right, scalloped by the street lamps into white semi-circles of incandescent light, whose dim edges touched one another. There was a triangular open space across the road to her left. Some hotel or club opened upon it. As she watched, one of the glass leaves of the door swung open, and two men in evening dress came out. They parted at the bottom of the steps with some light talk that ended in a coarse unrestrained laugh. One took a cab, the other went swinging along and still shaking with laughter, in the opposite direction. Call for help!—tell her story!—to a world like this!
She closed the window and looked round her with that despairing glance that leaves no corner unscanned. Suddenly her eyes were arrested in their search. At the farthest end of the room, just beyond the light of a shaded reading lamp, they caught the familiar ebony and silver of a telephone apparatus. The nurse was not to leave them till to-morrow, and she was sleeping in Miss Rigby's old room. They had decided to give up their telephone, but there was a month or so of the old lease still to run. She tiptoed across the room, lifted the receiver from its bracket and put it to her ear. Silence for a long, long while. Then the metallic sound of feet approaching along a zinc-covered floor.
"Number please?"
She tried to keep her voice low and steady.
"3087 Paddington."