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Just two or three, perhaps, would have liked to be disagreeable, but they did not dare." He hurried away, for his guests were arriving thick and fast. It was a strange and, or so Mrs. Otway would have thought, a rather pathetic little company of men and women, who gathered together at Manfred Hegner's Stores at nine o'clock on that fine August night.
And then Hegner's brow cleared as if by enchantment, for the first of their visitors were coming through from the back of the shop. It was the manager of a big boot factory and his wife. They were both German-born, and the man had obtained his present excellent position owing to the good offices of Mr. Hegner. Taking his friend's wise advice, he had become naturalised a year ago.
And then she looked round, instinctively, towards the corner of the large shop where all that remained of what had once been the mainstay of Manfred Hegner's business was always temptingly set forth. This was a counter of Delicatessen. Glancing at the familiar corner, Mr. Hegner's customer told herself that her eyes must be playing her false.
It was now a quarter to nine; and suddenly there came the sound of loud, rather impatient knocking on the locked and barred front door of the shop. A frown gathered over Mr. Hegner's face; it transformed his good-looking, generally genial, countenance into something which was, for the moment, very disagreeable. "What can that be?" he said to his wife.
Hayley had no kind of right to interfere with her and her concerns, and she had no fear that he would do so. "If you are so sure you can make it all right," the man whispered low in German, "I will leave the house by some other way there is surely some back way of leaving the house? I will walk away, and stop at Hegner's till I know the coast is clear."
The owner of the Witanbury Stores went over to the place where Anna Bauer was sitting talking to the mother of one of Mr. Hegner's German employés. To call that young man German is, however, wrong, for some six weeks ago he had become naturalised. Well for him that he had done so, otherwise he would have had now to go back to the Fatherland and fight.
But a nephew, who had joined him in business, had not followed his example, and he had been one of the young men who had been speeded off to Harwich, through Mr. Hegner's exertions, early that morning. While Mrs. Hegner tried to make herself pleasant to Mrs. Liebert, Mr. Hegner took Mr. Liebert aside.
Good old Anna, hurrying out into the black and white hall to meet her gracious lady, did not receive Mr. Hegner's kind invitation as her mistress had supposed she would do. A look of indecision and annoyance crossed her pink face. "Ach, but to go to Mr. Fröhling promised have I," she muttered. And then Mrs. Otway exclaimed, "But the Fröhlings are Germans! They will certainly be there themselves.
And Hegner, the shop foreman, who had been sober for a year, lost his grip and got drunk. Because he was ashamed and hated himself, his temper was always at half-cock. And Smith poor Smith, the ex-convict, to whom Jonathan's kindness had been as water on a lame duck's back had to bear the brunt of Hegner's distemper. He stood it as long as he could; which was not very long.
"We too asked to Hegner's have been. As you are going, we your example will follow," shouted the barber. Rose Otway sat in the garden of the Trellis House, under the wide-branched cedar of Lebanon which was, to the thinking of most people in the Close, that garden's only beauty.
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