Love and hatred

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

With dry lips she muttered, "Yes, so do I. But I would rather come all the same. I'll wait outside the door."

Poor Katty! She was telling herself that it was surely impossible—impossible that Godfrey Pavely should be dead.

Though his vitality had always been low, he had been intensely individual. His self-importance, his egoism, his lack of interest in anything but himself, Katty, and the little world where he played so important a part—all that had made him a forceful personality, especially to this woman who had possessed whatever he had had of heart and passionate feeling. She had felt of late as if he were indeed part of the warp and woof of her life, and deep in her scheming mind had grown a kind of superstitious belief that sooner or later their lives would become one.

The thought that he might be lying dead in this great new building filled her with a sort of sick horror. There seemed something at once so futile and so hideously cruel about so stupid an accident as that described in the Portuguese financier's letter.

They stepped out on to a top landing, from which branched off several narrow corridors. The agent led the way down one of these. "Room No. 18? This must be it—this is it! Look, there are the two keyholes!"

The younger and the brawnier of the two plainclothes detectives came forward. "If you'll just stand aside, gentlemen, for a minute or two, we'll soon get this door open. It's quite an easy matter."

He opened his unobtrusive-looking, comparatively small bag. There was a sound of wrenching wood and metal, and then the door swung backwards into the room together with a thick green velvet curtain fixed along the top of the door on a hinged rod.

A flood of wintry sunshine, thrown by the blinking now setting sun of a London January afternoon, streamed into the dark passage, and Sir Angus Kinross strode forward into the room, Lord St. Amant immediately behind him.

Katty shrank back and then placed herself by the wall of the passage. She put her hand over her eyes, as if to shut out a dreadful sight, yet all there was to see was an open door through which came a shaft of pallid wintry afternoon light.

For a space of perhaps thirty seconds, Sir Angus's trained eyes and mind took in what he supposed to be every detail of the oblong room overlooking the now bare tree tops of the Green Park. He noted that the office furniture was extremely good—first-rate of its kind. Also that the most prominent thing in the room was an American roll-top desk of an exceptionally large size.