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Its womanliness sat tragically on the figure of so stern a piece of virility. He heard a conversation below, the opening of the coach-house door, and the putting in of a horse, but took no notice. Here he stayed till the thin shades thickened to opaque obscurity, and the loft-door became an oblong of gray light the only visible shape around.
He drew up, lowered his pail, and began in a business-like way to slap paste upon the upper flap of a loft-door across the way, chatting the while over his shoulder. "Good evenin', naybours! Is it a Bye-Law? No, it is not a Bye-Law. Or is it a Tender? No, it is not a Tender. Or is it a Bankrup' Stock, or a Primrose Feet, or at the worst a Wesleyan Anniversary?
A steady stream of writing dropped from that loft-door and poured all the morning into the offices of the evening newspapers; while the morning-newspaper men sat quietly and looked on, knowing that they could write up their own account later from the reports in the evening sheets.
When now 'twas mid-day and fiercely hot in my loft, my three labourers sat down behind a tree and ate their noonday meal. I went to the loft-door and devoured my second crust of bread and took a fresh gulp of water. Very calmly, without thinking, lame with the heat and with that old-man's feeling still inside me, I went and sat at the window. The three men worked on, always, without stopping.
Nott cautiously dropped through the opening to the deck below, and, going to the other hatch through which the Lascar had vanished, deliberately refastened it. In a few moments Renshaw returned with a light, and found the old man sitting on the hatch. "The loft-door was open," said Renshaw. "There's little doubt whoever was here escaped that way." "Surely," said Nott.
This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two rooms one of them opening upon nothing by a loft-door over a garage that had been a coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin running on polished brass rods.
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