Beneath the hissing incandescent gas-jet Bernard Boyne looked very pale, his eyes deeply set, his brow furrowed and careworn. He seemed weary and out-of-sorts.
"Fool!" he grunted aloud to himself. "I'm growing nervous! I suppose it is that big cheque that I had to-day—seven thousand, eight hundred—the biggest I've ever had. I wonder if I ought to tell Lilla?"
The room was the typical home of a man earning an income on commission just sufficient to enable him to "rub along" in comfort. It was certainly not the room of a man who was receiving cheques for such sums as seven thousand, eight hundred pounds.
At first glance Bernard Boyne, as he stood there in his shirt-sleeves, was an excellent type of the steady, reliable insurance agent, with no soul above "proposals" and "premiums." They constituted his sole aim in life, now that his "dear wife" was dead.
Nobody suspected the man who so piously passed round the bag in St. George the Martyr on Sundays to be a man of mystery. Nobody, indeed, would ever have dreamed that the active man in question would be placing cheques to his account of such value as seven thousand odd pounds.
"I wonder how long I shall remain here?" he whispered to himself. "I wonder what all these good people would say if they but knew—eh? If they knew! But, happily, they don't know!" He chuckled to himself.
He was silent for a moment as he crossed to rearrange the dusty old Venetian blinds.
Then he turned to a half-open cupboard beside the fireplace, and from it took a small wire cage from which he released a tame white rat, which instantly ran up his arm and settled upon his shoulder.
"Poor little Nibby!" he exclaimed, tenderly stroking its sharp pink snout with his forefinger. "Have I neglected you? Poor little fellow!—a prisoner all day! But if I let you out when I'm away some nasty terrier might get you—eh? Come let me atone for my neglect."
And he placed his pet upon the table, over which the rodent ran to investigate the remains of the meal.