"Er—Miss Causton," Sir Julius called—"can you stay for an hour or so? No, a private affair; I hope it's not inconvenient; thanks."
He was sickly white and tired-looking; Louie's feet dragged, and her brain was as stupid as clay. She was sorry for Sir Julius; he had had no preparation; as for Louie, it seemed to her now that she had been passing from preparation to preparation for such things for the whole of her life. This of the morning paper was only the latest of her fulfilments. The prophets, she thought dully, must have been very weary men.... But on second thoughts perhaps Sir Julius ought to have been sorry for her. Even shock is better than foreknowledge.
For of course Sir Julius wanted her to stay in connection with this of Mrs. Jeffries.
She had put on her hat and coat for departure; as if she walked in her sleep, she passed out of Sir Julius's room and removed them again. She bathed her face, but felt little fresher; then she returned.
It was about Mrs. Jeffries. It was about them both. Then Louie seemed to remember that Sir Julius had said something about an article on his deceased colleague for a Review. She supposed that was why he wanted her to take down his words in shorthand. Unless it was for the inquest. Gas-taps turned on, doors and windows sealed, and so forth usually meant an inquest; and they would not have far to look for her motive—suicide through natural grief. It was only that morning, but it seemed an old, old story already.
"'Tragic Death of a Lady,'" Sir Julius read out from a newspaper....
Well, he wouldn't want that part taken down; indeed, if he had only known what Louie knew, he would not have asked her to take anything down at all. But her notebook was on her knee and her pencil sharpened, and when Sir Julius had finished reading her hand began to write, purely functionally, of itself. It was no trouble to Louie whatever; nay, her hand was hardly called upon more than her mind; the pencil itself did it. After all, foreseeing minds could be put to better uses than the mere recording of things after the event.... "Sad business, sad business," Sir Julius was saying; and "Sad business, sad business," the obedient pencil wrote. But Louie wondered whether it was so sad after all. Evie Jeffries had had a sort of foreknowledge too; "I could die for him; you couldn't do more," Louie remembered she had once said; yet it was doubtful whether she had died for love of him after all. Call it gas-taps, or the shock of discovering that Jim had been her lover's executioner....
Still, she had died, from whatever reason, and she had been quite right in saying that Louie could have done no more.
It was strange the way the pencil wrote of itself. "A page of notes in her husband's shorthand has been found under one of the pillars of the writing-table," it wrote, and it omitted, as if it had been endowed with Louie's own intelligence, Sir Julius's interpolated remark, "I've got that page of notes, by the way." Mr. Whitlock had described to Louie one day a contrivance called a tele-writer; a pen dipped itself into a bottle of ink and wrote, unassisted, a telegraphed message; they were new, and they hadn't got them at the Consolidation yet; but they were putting them into some of the post offices, Mr. Whitlock had said. Her pencil moved like the pen of a tele-writer. She watched it, fascinated. It was writing as Sir Julius talked, about Jim now.
"—lived an intense crowded life too. I should say at a guess there weren't many things he hadn't done at one time and another, short of a murder or a matrimonial infidelity. Don't think he could have been tempted to do that. One woman could do anything she liked with him, but the others wouldn't have much chance——"