Mrs. Wiles entered as he spoke. She was a colorless, negative kind of a
woman, fair, fat, flabby, and forty or thereabouts. She had been the
ill-used slave of a local carpenter, now deceased by reason of
over-drinking; her nature was to be the slave of the nearest male
creature, not from affection (her affections were anemic) but rather, as
it seemed, from an instinctive desire to shuffle off from herself any
responsibility. But, at all events, she was entirely free from Miss Delia
Wall's proclivity.

Mr. Saffron rose. "I'll go and wash my hands. We'll dine just as we are,
Hector." Beaumaroy opened the door for him; he acknowledged the attention
with a little nod, and passed out to the staircase in the narrow passage.
Beaumaroy appeared to consider himself absolved from any preparation, for
he returned to the big chair and, sinking into it, lit another cigarette.
Meanwhile Mrs. Wiles laid the table, and presently Sergeant Hooper
appeared with a bottle of golden-tinted wine.

"That, at least, is the real stuff," thought Beaumaroy as he eyed it in
pleasurable anticipation. "Where the dear old man got it, I don't know;
but in itself it's almost worth all the racket."

And really, in its present stages, so far as its present developments
went, the "racket" pleased him. It amused his active brain, besides (as
he had said to Mr. Saffron) exercising his active body, though certainly
in a rather grotesque and bizarre fashion. The attraction of it went
deeper than that. It appealed to some of those tendencies and impulses of
his character which had earned such heavy censure from Major-General
Punnit and had produced so grave an expression on Captain Alec's handsome
face without, however, being, even in that officer's exacting judgment,
disgraceful. And, finally, there was the lure of unexplored