"Hsh!" Edwin, alarmed, endeavoured gently to soothe him.
"All right! All right!" Cannon proceeded in a lower but still impassioned voice. "But look here! You’re a man. You know what’s what. You’ll understand what I mean. Believe me when I say that I wouldn’t live with that woman for eternal salvation. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. I’ve taken some of her money, only a little, and run off..." He paused, and went on with conscious persuasiveness now: "I’ve just got here. I had to ask your whereabouts. I might have been recognised in the streets, but I haven’t been. I didn’t expect to find you here at this time. I might have had to sleep in the town to-night. I wouldn’t have come to your private house. Now I’ve seen you I shall get along to Crewe to-night. I shall be safer there. And it’s on the way to Liverpool and America. I want to go to America. With a bit o’ capital I shall be all right in America. It’s my one chance; but it’s a good one. But I must have some capital. No use landing in New York with empty pockets."
Said Edwin, still shying at the main issues:
"I was under the impression you had been to America once."
"Yes, that’s why I know. I hadn’t any money. And what’s more," he added with peculiar emphasis, "I was brought back."
At that instant he saw the shadow of Hilda’s head and shoulders on the glass of the door.
"Excuse me a second," he murmured, bounded with astonishing velocity out of the room, and pulled the door to after him with a bang.
Hilda, having observed the strange, excited gesture, paused a moment, in an equally strange tranquillity, before speaking. Edwin fronted her at the very door. Then she said, clearly and deliberately, through her veil:
"Auntie Hamps has had an attack--heart. The doctor says she can’t possibly live through the night. It was at Clara’s."
This was the first of Mrs. Hamps’s fatal heart-attacks.
"Ah!" breathed Edwin, with apparently a purely artistic interest in the affair. "So that’s it, is it? Then she’s at Clara’s."
"I forget his name. Lives in Acre Lane. They sent for the nearest. She can’t get her breath--has to fight for it. She jumped out of bed, struggling to breathe."
"Well, I suppose I’d better go round. You go back. I’ll follow you."