I decided, of course, that I would not do that in any case. Already I began to fear that what I had said I should do would not be done after all; Fanshawe had guessed my secret, and was going that morning to see Olivant; obviously the first thing he would do would be to put Olivant upon his guard. I wondered how Fanshawe had come to guess what I had believed to be so securely locked in my own heart; I blamed myself that I had not been more careful in guarding the very expression of my face. However, I knew that I must risk all now upon the one throw.
The events of that day are stamped clearly enough upon my recollection; almost I seem to see myself walking again through the streets, waiting for the hour when I could make for Lincoln's Inn Fields. Just as on that other occasion, when I had set about a similar business, so now I found myself going back to scenes I knew, and looking again at various places, as it were for the last time. For I had counted my chances; and I knew that even while every door seemed closed that could by any possibility let suspicion in, one might be standing open, and I unable to see it. If once Murray Olivant were recognized, that confidential servant who had been seen about with him must be looked for; must be discovered to be a certain Charles Avaline—who had killed a man before, and barely escaped the gallows for his crime. I counted the chances, and the scale weighed heavily against me.
I drifted back in the course of that long day to the rooms from which Murray Olivant must long since have gone, and there caught a glimpse of a lurking figure that I knew must be Arnold Millard. He did not see me; he was doggedly pacing up and down, watching that empty cage, and waiting for his man, who would not come out of that place again.
Then I went to the lodging where Barbara and the girl had been the night before; I wondered if Barbara had yet kept her promise to take the girl away, back to her father. Surely in time, I thought, young Millard must drift back there, and meet the girl; and so round off the love story in which I was so strongly interested.
I found I could not eat; twice I had gone into various places, and ordered a meal, and left the food untouched. And yet I did not seem to need food; all sensation seemed dead within me, or at all events only sharpened to the point of what I had to do. And so at last I came in the dusk into Lincoln's Inn Fields; found the house, and climbed the stairs.
I listened at the door for a moment or two; then softly pushed the key into the lock, and passed into the rooms. They were in darkness, and for a moment or two I stood listening, wondering if the man had yet arrived. Then I called his name, and heard it echoing through the ghostly silent place, and coming back at me as though in mockery—
"Mr. Olivant! Mr. Olivant!"
I came out again, and lingered about near the house. There were few people about at that time; only once a pair of lovers passed me, as another pair of lovers, twenty years before, had walked in front of me on such a night in that place. I found myself wondering idly what had become of that first pair; whether they had been parted, or whether they had married, or what had become of them. Even while I thought that, I saw Murray Olivant striding along the pavement in the distance, with his cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth, and a thin trail of smoke floating behind him.
I got out of the way hurriedly, and let him go into the house without seeing me. I stood there, trying to think how he would climb the stairs—how long it would take him to reach this landing, and now that; so many more moments for his fumbling with a lock he did not understand; and now he was in the place, waiting for me!