Her friends and acquaintances, landlady and neighbours, no longer looked at her curiously or sympathetically or maliciously. Lite went on much as it had before she had met him. But she had changed—she was older, there were times when she felt careworn and thought she looked haggard. At twenty-five! She was in love with a man she might never see again, whom the world believed to be a murderer, but—

He wasn’t a murderer; it was fantastic nonsense and she wouldn’t pay heed to the evidence, damning though it was. She—

She caught sight of something at the foot of the door. It hadn’t been there a moment before. It looked like a piece of paper and she could see only the corner. It was pale blue in colour and someone was pushing it slowly beneath the door. It was an envelope—and suddenly it shot across the polished boards and struck the edge of a large rug. She stared, incredulously; and then suddenly rushed across the room and opened the door. She heard footsteps.

On the landing she looked over and saw a man running down the last flight of stairs. He had a bald patch in the middle of a dark, oily head of hair. He didn’t glance up. He reached the front door, opened it and disappeared; and before she was halfway down the first flight of stairs the door banged again.

When she reached the porch he was out of sight; the house was near a corner which he had rounded. No one else was in the short street with the tall, terraced houses on either side.

A car turned into the street and she would not have taken much notice of it, except for the fact that it was a Rolls-Bentley—Jim’s idea of what a car should be. He had planned to buy one, in that wonderful world of make-believe, when he was thirty-seven—eleven years hence. It would be green and they would call it the Queen. This was green. The man at the wheel was glancing right and left, as if searching for a particular house. She noticed that he was good-looking—the kind of man one might expect to find at the wheel of a Rolls-Bentley. Then she went inside, carrying a picture in her mind of the dark oily hair and the bald spot.