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Laurence sat on, a cold perspiration thick on his forehead. Someone else, then, had come on the body and turned the pockets inside out before John Evan took the ring. A man such as Walenn would not be out at night without money. Besides, if Evan had found money on the body he would never have run the risk of taking that ring. Yes, someone else had come on the body first.
This man, this Walenn, was, by all accounts, better dead than alive; no need to waste a thought on him! But, crime the ugliness Justice unsatisfied! Crime concealed and his own share in the concealment! And yet brother to brother! Surely no one could demand action from him! It was only a question of what he was going to advise Larry to do. To keep silent, and disappear?
A man called Walenn, a mongrel American, living in the same house, married her, or pretended to she's very pretty, Keith he left her with a baby six months old, and another coming. That one died, and she did nearly. Then she starved till another fellow took her on. She lived with him two years; then Walenn turned up again, and made her go back to him.
"This dropped while we were struggling." It was an empty envelope with a South American post-mark addressed: "Patrick Walenn, Simon's Hotel, Farrier Street, London." Again with that twitching in his heart, Keith said: "Put it in the fire." Then suddenly he stooped to pluck it out. By that command he had identified himself with this this But he did not pluck it out.
He never went to see Keith, never wrote to him, hardly thought of him. And from those dread apparitions Walenn lying with the breath choked out of him, and the little grey, driven animal in the dock he hid, as only a man can who must hide or be destroyed. But daily he bought a newspaper, and feverishly, furtively scanned its columns.
Testimony of the hotel-keeper where Walenn had been staying, the identification of his body, and of a snake-shaped ring he had been wearing at dinner that evening. Testimony of a pawnbroker, that this same ring was pawned with him the first thing yesterday morning by the prisoner.
"Where did you live when you saw him last?" "In Pimlico." "Does anybody about here know you as Mrs. Walenn?" "No. When I came here, after my little girl died, I came to live a bad life. Nobody knows me at all. I am quite alone." "If they discover who he was, they will look for his wife?" "I do not know. He did not let people think I was married to him.
When I went to her last night, that brute that Walenn had found her out again; and when he came for me, swaggering and bullying Look!" he touched a dark mark on his forehead "I took his throat in my hands, and when I let go " "Yes?" "Dead. I never knew till afterwards that she was hanging on to him behind." Again he made that gesture-wringing his hands.
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