“If it had anything to do with the theatre, I don’t suppose I finished it; all those things are sent on to Manders. I’m sorry, Miss Maitland; I wouldn’t have disappointed you for the world.”
“I began to feel desperate,” she answered dully. “It seemed needlessly unkind. Of course, I ought to have known that you were very famous—”
“Please! I’ve apologized. I hoped I’d cleared myself. Won’t you choose your own time for coming,—if you think I can do any good?”
She swung her latch-key reflectively and then touched his arm with her fingers.
“Won’t you come in—just for a moment?” she pleaded.
“I’m thinking of you,” he repeated.
“You’ll do me more good by coming in for five minutes than by thinking of my reputation... I’m desperate.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used that word; you oughtn’t to know the meaning of it.”
“Ah, if you come in, don’t treat me like a child.”
Eric followed her into a narrow, ill-ventilated hall, lighted by a pin-point of gas. The house was old and full of half-heard noises and dry, distant scents; the first floor was let to a solicitor, the second to a dramatic agent; above that was a double flat and at the top, crushed squat under the roof and pared by sloping ceilings, Ivy Maitland’s own roomy attic. As she turned up the gas, he saw a round table and wicker chairs, a piano and book-case and, in an alcove, a cupboard, bed and chest of drawers. While she slipped off her cloak and pulled the curtains over the alcove, he read the titles of the books and glanced at the photographs on the piano. The place of honour was given to an officer in the uniform of the Air Force, and Eric guessed its identity almost without looking at the face or at the “Yours always, John Gaymer,” scrawled across one corner.