Bewildered, she looked at him for a moment, and then glanced at Jimmy as if for permission; he slowly bowed his head. "I am Mr. Larrance's wife," she said.
Jimmy put up a hand quickly as Ashby Feak would have spoken. "It's quite true; you need not say anything, and I am not going to explain. This leaves you free of course; I will write a letter to-night, putting myself right in that quarter. Good night!"
Ashby Feak, with a nod and a shrug of the shoulders, went out; they heard the door slam behind him. Jimmy moved slowly across to the window, without looking at Moira at all; she was watching him intently. After a pause, in which it seemed that they could hear their very hearts beat, she whispered a question:
"Jimmy—is there someone else?" He did not reply. "Someone else you love, I mean?"
He did not look round at her; he stared down into the dark street below. Across it a man was going hurriedly, and he was going in one direction—straight to Alice.
"Yes," he said at last, in a heavy tone—"there is someone else."
CHAPTER IV
THE LONG NIGHT
Much in the fashion of a bear that has hibernated through a long winter, and has come out lean and hungry into the warmth and brightness of the new summer—so Anthony Ditchburn crawled out of his mean lodging one sunny morning, and looked about him. He was a frowsy, unwholesome-looking bear at the best, and he blinked at the sunshine, basking a little in it with some faint show of pleasure, and facing life again with some show of hope.