"Sydney!"
"It's the truth, and you know it. What's the good of either of us pretending that you don't?"
"Will you please say nothing else until we reach your rooms? I won't, and I'd rather you didn't either. I'm going with you to your rooms, and nothing you can say or do will stop me. Now will you please be silent till we get to 97 Lavender Sweep? I think that, while we're in this cab, I prefer your silence to your conversation."
She had her way; not a word was spoken on either side until the cab drew up in front of one of a long terrace of houses.
CHAPTER XXXIII
["Vi!"]
Miss Forster looked about the room into which he had ushered her, the first room on the right when you had come through the front door. It was the usual ground-floor front apartment of the £45 a year suburban "modern residence," a fair size, as a habitation for a "single gentleman," with a sufficiency of light, and air, and space.
"If this is one of your 'wretched rooms,' I don't think it's very wretched, don't you know; it compares not at all unfavourably with my best parlour."
Standing before the empty fireplace, he was observing her with singular intentness, brows knit, head bowed between his shoulders.
"You understand where the money to pay for this palatial apartment has come from; how it has been--earned? You saw me engaged in the practice of my profession that night at Avonham."