I watched him all that night. In the morning the sun came fiercely in. The hot, golden air seemed all Sunday frocks, church bells, and the weighty caw of rooks.
There was a pane of glass above Orion’s bedroom door. He said, quite quietly,—it was the first time he had spoken:
“She keeps on looking through that glass. There’s a confounded red bonnet on her head now—never knew such a woman for red. Can’t you do something? Can’t you rig up a curtain, old chap?”
There was a crafty look on his silly face. I remembered that afterward. I turned aside to find something, and the next thing I knew was a “ploomp” on the stones underneath and a loud, ringing shriek.
Orion had flung himself out. It was really the best finish he could have made. Adeline saw him do it and shrieked. She was standing at Murphy’s window; Orion, in his fluttering shirt, dropped past her startled eyes. I must tell you Adeline’s story some day.
The money? That was the one funny touch in the whole affair. Mrs. Grigg actually left the house and every penny she had in the world to the man who brought her round two hundredweight of coal once a week, from the greengrocer’s shop in Red Lion Street. He was a handsome sort of chap—that seemed the only reason. He sold the house. I heard the other day that he was drinking himself to death.
Clara Citron? She went back to the lodging-house at Southsea; is there now, I suppose. But she was one of those women without attributes; not the sort of person you would have the least interest in investigating.
Hard on Orion, wasn’t it? Quite superfluous, you see. I never liked him. Yet, looking back, I’m sorry for the mean little humbug. That cursed City grinds men down to any pettiness. I’d rather starve in Piccadilly than eat turtle in an Alderman’s robe at Guildhall.