Then, to his extreme astonishment, on the very day after Mollie's departure for Santon, he left Monty to a sandwich-and-coffee luncheon in the studio and came out of his house to find Lennox Street almost as full of people as it had been on the morning when the parachute had descended on the studio roof.
"What's the matter? Anything happened?" he asked the nearest loiterer at his gate; but he did not learn what had really happened till he reached the Club.
Certainly the joke, if it was a joke, appeared to be "on him." Simultaneously two grinning fellow-members thrust into his hand that morning's issue of the Roundabout. The Roundabout, I should say, is the Circus's (much inferior) rival.
It contained a photograph of Esdaile's house, with the spot where the parachute had descended marked with a cross.
It was, of course, a thousand pities. No man likes the house he lives in held up to the idle public gaze. Had the annoying thing been submitted to my own paper I could have stopped it. Had it been a big thing I might even have stopped its appearance in the Roundabout, for, while we cut one another's throats in detail, we have our understandings in larger matters. Hurriedly I scanned the rest of the paper to see whether any letterpress went with the picture. None did. There was simply the photograph, with a couple of quite innocent descriptive lines underneath.
"Seems to me rather a stumer," I said to Willett. "Is Hodgson losing his grip a bit?"
"Haven't noticed it," Willett replied. "Sound man Hodgson. Doesn't often do things without a reason. I think we might go a bit slower on actresses and mannequins. This is the crash we were talking about the other morning, isn't it?"
"Yes. A wash-out I should have said."
"Perhaps he's playing the local-interest card. He's doing that just now. I don't see why we shouldn't do more of it."
"I think we'll wait for a better story than that anyway," I replied. "Well, let's get to work——"