A few minutes' reflection would have shown Esdaile that there was no immediate reason why he should have hesitated to have that wardrobe carried down into his cellar. He himself admits this. But it is easy to think of these things afterwards, and he was caught off his guard. He did allow reluctance to appear.

"Why not move this desk and let it stand here?" he said, pointing to the writing-table with the mignonette-shaded lamp on it. "It's not a bad-looking piece at all. Pity to hide it. What is it—Jacobean?"

It was either genuine Jacobean or else a passable copy, but, placed where Philip proposed to place it it would have been a little in the way of anybody passing to the French window. Mrs. Cunningham pointed this out.

"Do you think so? Let's measure it," Esdaile replied.

Measurement of the piece confirmed Mrs. Cunningham's view, and Philip next suggested that it should go into the large studio.

"Why not have it where you can get at it and use it?" he said. "I thought women complained they could never get hanging-space enough. Or what about upstairs in Mollie's room?"

But Audrey Cunningham's frocks, which she made quite wonderfully herself out of almost nothing at all, were few, and Mollie had left her plenty of room for them. Besides, there were the dress-baskets. These would hardly add to the beauty either of the annexe or the studio. For the baskets at any rate the most convenient place was certainly the cellar. And it was at this point that Philip, recognizing that further objection would look rather like obstinacy, yielded.

He confesses that he felt awkward about the whole situation. Either he had lent his house or he had not. If the former, Monty and his fiancÉe should have had the complete freedom of it; if the latter, or if for any reason he regretted his generosity, the position was even more obscure. To say that until the marriage he had lent it to Monty only and not to Mrs. Cunningham was mere quibbling; he had made the offer in entire good faith, and had not made a lawyer's matter of it, with clauses and reservations about this, that and the other.

Yet here he not only was, but here very much master of the house whether he wished it or not. Audrey Cunningham would of course be very nice about it, but he could see very plainly how it must strike her. He did not even pretend to be working. He was merely hanging on, for a reason unexplained and unexplainable to her. Monty knew his reason, of course; but the reason she supposed to be the truth (for she had been told that one of the men who had crashed was their friend and Joan Merrow's more than friend) by no means accounted for everything. It did not account for a quarter of his eccentricities; it did not even account for his latest inadvertence, of proposing any place in the house except the cellar for the bestowal of that nuisance of a wardrobe. What an ass he had been about that! The cellar could be made perfectly safe at an instant's warning; as a matter of fact it was perfectly safe at that moment. There was no reason whatever why Audrey Cunningham should not go down there.

But things would get worse as time went on. Presently Audrey would be living here, as Monty's wife, and it would be difficult for Philip to delay his departure after that. A honeymoon is a honeymoon even when it is spent in a borrowed studio, and newly-married couples don't commonly take in fussy and fretful lodgers. Within a week or so he or they would most certainly have to clear out.

Philip could have stated what had actually happened in one short sentence. He had offered them one house, but was now called upon to hand over to them the possession of quite a different one.

But this was impossible to explain without dragging in the thing of all things that he wished to keep from Audrey, from Mollie, and above all from Joan—that beastly episode of the pistol, with all it involved.

And here at any rate he was quite firm. Chance what might, that must be kept the men's affair only. As far as the women were concerned at present the accident was a pure accident. Well, an accident it must remain.

But what about that Police Inspector who had appeared so suddenly in our midst the night before, and for all Philip knew might be round again at any moment? Audrey Cunningham had been told nothing about that. She might have many opinions about Philip's delayed departure, but about a series of domiciliary visits by the police she could have one only, namely, that the loan of a studio wasn't worth it. In suppressing this piece of information Philip was actually doing his best to keep her in Lennox Street. To have informed her would have been much the same thing as asking her to leave.

And what exactly had passed when Philip's tenor voice, interrupting the Inspector's deep one, had said, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in"?