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set, vice of the recognised description was, perhaps, permissible to
those contemptible weaklings, men, but this was Evil on the High Roads.
She was bound to make a fuss, and these fusses invariably took the final
form of a tightness of money for Bechamel. Albeit, and he felt it was
heroic of him to resolve so, it was worth doing if it was to be done.
His imagination worked on a kind of matronly Valkyrie, and the noise of
pursuit and vengeance was in the air. The idyll still had the front of
the stage. That accursed detective, it seemed, had been thrown off the
scent, and that, at any rate, gave a night's respite. But things must be
brought to an issue forthwith.
By eight o'clock in the evening, in a little dining-room in the Vicuna
Hotel, Bognor, the crisis had come, and Jessie, flushed and angry in the
face and with her heart sinking, faced him again for her last struggle
with him. He had tricked her this time, effectually, and luck had been
on his side. She was booked as Mrs. Beaumont. Save for her refusal to
enter their room, and her eccentricity of eating with unwashed hands,
she had so far kept up the appearances of things before the waiter.
But the dinner was grim enough. Now in turn she appealed to his better
nature and made extravagant statements of her plans to fool him.
He was white and vicious by this time, and his anger quivered through
his pose of brilliant wickedness.
"
I will go to the station," she said. "I will go back--"
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