CHAPTER SIX THE UNWRITTEN LAW
"She said, 'Be good with me; I grow
So tired for shame's sake, I shall die
If you say nothing:' ..."
A. C. Swinburne: The Leper.
1
For a fugitive from justice London is either the best hiding-place in the world, or else the worst; I have never had an opportunity of deciding, and Mrs. O'Rane's experience has not helped me.
She left Milford Square in the first week of December; in the middle of January her husband and friends gleaned their first news of her. So both succeeded and both failed.
She has told me that her first action after leaving Grayle was to enter a tube station and to study a railway map of London. Her knees were trembling violently, and her brain was numbed so that she stared at names without reading them until something inside her head like the ticking of a watch, now silent, now intrusive, as her attention was captured or left free, warned her to concentrate her thoughts; she had to get away, and time was being lost, time was being lost....