She half smiled at the idea. "They would never dare," she agreed confidently.
He would have been glad of his overcoat, but that was in his bedroom, and he dreaded the indelicacy of going there while she was present. So in the event he bade her a brief good-night, and found himself on the dark and chilly stairs without so much as a pillow or a blanket to make sleep possible. For lack of anything else in the shape of a weapon, he had brought his silver-keyed flute with him; if he were invaded in the small hours it might serve him again; it seemed to have a virtue for quelling police officials.
About three o'clock in the morning he awoke from an uneasy doze, chilled to the marrow, and was prompted to try if the flute would still make music. It would not. It is too much to ask of any instrument that has been used as an instrument of war. It had saved a Jewess and her child, magnified its owner into a man of action, and was thenceforth silent for ever.
"I must have hit that officer pretty hard," was the reflection of
Robert Lucas.
The episode closed shortly before noon next day, when two elderly men of affairs came to fetch his guests away. They entered the room while he was entertaining the baby with a whistled selection from his repertoire of flute music, and he broke off short as they regarded him from the doorway. The Jewess looked up alertly as they entered.
They bowed to Lucas with a manner of servility in which there was an ironic suggestion, while their eyes examined him shrewdly. They were bearded, aquiline persons, soft-spoken and withal formidable. He had a notion that they found him amusing, but suppressed their amusement.
"Then it is you we have to thank," said the elder of them, when formal greetings had been exchanged, "for the safety of this girl and her child."
"I don't want any thanks," protested Lucas.
He could not tell them how the thanks he had already received transcended any words they could speak.
"It was a villainous thing," he went on. "I'm glad I could help. Er— is the silversmith all, right?"