CHAPTER III

ANNE CASPAR

Edward Caspar, something of the scholar, something of the artist, even a little of the saint, was notoriously bad at keeping secrets.

"Old Ned leaks," his friends at Harrow and Trinity used to say. The charge was unfortunately true. It was because he had a secret it was important he should keep that, knowing his own weakness, he had settled in Old Town, to be out of danger.

Up there on the hill he would meet none of his quondam friends, who, if they came to Beachbourne at all, would go to one of the fine hotels in New Town along the sea front by the Wish.

But Nature, which has no mercy on weakness in any form, was too much for the soft young man.

It was barely a week after his first visit to 60 Rectory Walk that Mr. Trupp was sent for again.

The same woman opened to him with the same fierce, almost defiant face.

"Well?" he said.

"It's pleurisy, he says," she answered. "Pretty sharp."

He unwound himself in the passage.

"He may want a nurse then."

"He won't," cried the woman, the note of challenge in her voice. "I'll nurse him."

"Can you manage it--with your work?"

"If I can't no one else shan't," the woman snorted, almost threateningly. "First door on the left."

Mr. Trupp, grinning to himself, went up the stairs, and was aware that the woman was standing at the foot watching his back. She did not follow.

The young surgeon climbed thoughtfully, absorbing his environment, as the good doctor does. The varnished paper on the wall, the cheap carpet under his feet, the sham drain-pipe that served as an umbrella-stand in the passage; they were all the ordinary appurtenances of the house of this class, commonplace, even a little coarse, and affording a strange contrast to the almost exotic refinement and distinction of the sitting-room on the ground floor. The house too was bright and clean as a hospital, hard too, he thought, as its landlady. There was no lodging-house smell, his nose, trained in the great wards of the Whitechapel, noted with approval. Windows were kept clearly open, sunshine admitted as a friend. He trailed his fingers up the bannisters and examined them, when he had turned the corner and was out of sight of the woman watching in the passage. Not a trace of dust! Yes, when he was in a position to start his Open-air Hostel on the cliff for tuberculous patients, this was the woman he should get for housekeeper.

He knocked at the door on the left, suddenly remembering that this must be the room in the window of which hung the chocolate-coloured _Apartments_ card.

Young Caspar's voice bid him enter.

The room was a bed-room and contained a double bed. In the window, where dangled the card, was a dressing-table, and on it, undisguised, the paraphernalia of a woman's toilet.

Edward Caspar lay in bed, breathing shortly, his face pinched with physical and spiritual suffering.

Beside the bed was a chair and on it a manuscript.

Mr. Trupp glanced at the inscription--_The Philosophy of Mysticism.