The first that Esdaile knew of all this was from the younger of Mollie's two maids. Monty and Audrey had arranged to dispense with the services of these two domestics, but Philip, still lingering on, had wanted the younger one at least back. She had promised to come, but had not done so, and Philip had sought her out. Thereupon she had said that she would rather not come. "Why?" Philip had asked; but she had given no satisfactory reason. He had then turned to the second maid, but with no better result. After all, it didn't matter. It was very little trouble for himself and Monty to make their own breakfasts. They could take their other meals at the Chelsea Arts Club, and there would be no difficulty in getting a woman one or two days a week to clean. Then, to his extreme astonishment, on the very day after Mollie's departure for Santon, he left Monty to a sandwich-and-coffee luncheon in the studio and came out of his house to find Lennox Street almost as full of people as it had been on the morning when the parachute had descended on the studio roof. "What's the matter? Anything happened?" he asked the nearest loiterer at his gate; but he did not learn what had really happened till he reached the Club. Certainly the joke, if it was a joke, appeared to be "on him." Simultaneously two grinning fellow-members thrust into his hand that morning's issue of the It contained a photograph of Esdaile's house, with the spot where the parachute had descended marked with a cross. It was, of course, a thousand pities. No man likes the house he lives in held up to the idle public gaze. Had the annoying thing been submitted to my own paper I could have stopped it. Had it been a big thing I might even have stopped its appearance in the Roundabout, for, while we cut one another's throats in detail, we have our understandings in larger matters. Hurriedly I scanned the rest of the paper to see whether any letterpress went with the picture. None did. There was simply the photograph, with a couple of quite innocent descriptive lines underneath. "Seems to me rather a stumer," I said to Willett. "Is Hodgson losing his grip a bit?" "Haven't noticed it," Willett replied. "Sound man Hodgson. Doesn't often do things without a reason. I think we might go a bit slower on actresses and mannequins. This is the crash we were talking about the other morning, isn't it?" "Yes. A wash-out I should have said." "Perhaps he's playing the local-interest card. He's doing that just now. I don't see why we shouldn't do more of it." "I think we'll wait for a better story than that anyway," I replied. "Well, let's get to work——" But all that afternoon the thing worried me. It was a trifle, perhaps, but it was a trifle on the wrong side. More, unlike some other trifles, I already saw how dangerously capable of further development it was. I have told you what the attitude of the Press I was inclined to think not, and for the reason I have just given. Make a thing big enough, and we hang fairly well together; but take the whips off, so to speak, and we go as we please. If it had been as important as all that we should have heard of it. Willett, who is a youngster of parts, was in all probability right. Hodgson was merely catering for the local interest. But still I was uneasy, and my uneasiness had nothing to do with the annoyance the publication of the photograph of the house in Lennox Street must cause Esdaile. I was thinking of far graver possible consequences. Even the lightest measure of Publicity is not a thing to be trifled with. Here I know what I am talking about. The merry fellows of the Chelsea Arts Club might pull Esdaile's leg about his haunted house, and want to know whether the White Lady dropped any hairpins as she passed, or if the horrible shrouded And what would be the effects on our Case if it came down? Well, you can see that for yourself. In obscurity lay our hope that the thing might remain what on the face of it it appeared to be. Switch the arc-lamps of the great papers on to it, with the whole power-house of dynamic government behind them, and all was over. Not an aspect of the Case would go unprobed to the very bottom, and the hungry newspapers would find themselves, not with a mere aeroplane crash that could be dismissed in a couple of lines, but with a really fine fat, first-class Murder Case that would keep them merrily going for weeks. And I can assure you that we all wanted very badly indeed just such a Case. We wanted it for more reasons than one. We wanted it, as we always do, in the ordinary way of our business, but much more we wanted it to take people's minds off other matters. We wanted it for the same reason that made us resolutely print those pictures of girls bathing during the blackest days of the War. We wanted it because the Man in the Public-house was restless and showed a |