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Viljohn-Smythe's, his elbows resting on the pitch-pine frame, was a middle-aged man. A cigarette was in his mouth and from his hands dangled a newspaper. He had a smooth-shaven, heavily-jowled face and a large pair of tortoise-shell spectacles on his nose. Desmond remembered to have seen the man already looking out of a window opposite his on one of the upper floors of the house.
Desmond had a small but comfortably furnished bedroom at the top of the house, on the second floor, with a window which commanded a view of the diminutive garden and the back of a row of large houses standing on the lower slopes of the hill. So precipitous was the fall of the ground, indeed, that Desmond could look right into the garden of the house backing on Mrs. Viljohn-Smythe's.
Viljohn-Smythe's. There was no mistaking it. The electric light was burning and the curtains had not yet been drawn. He could see the black and pink eiderdown on his bed and the black lining of the chintz curtains. Then he remembered the slope of the hill. He must be in the room from which he had seen Bellward looking out. The sight of the natty bedroom across the way moved Desmond strangely.
He caught a glimpse of the face of Maurice Strangwise, brows knit, nostrils dilated, the very picture of venomous, watchful rancor. Strangwise had halted and was now looking back over the wall into Mrs. Viljohn-Smythe's back garden. Was it possible, Desmond wondered, that he could believe that Desmond had scrambled back over the wall?
The time for darkening the windows must be at hand, he thought, for in most of the houses the blinds were already drawn. Here and there, however, an oblong of yellow light showed up against the dark mass of the houses on the upper slopes of the hill. The curtains of his bedroom at Mrs. Viljohn-Smythe's were not yet drawn and the light still burned brightly above the bed.
This garden had a patch of well-kept green sward in the centre with a plaster nymph in the middle, while in one corner stood a kind of large summer-house or pavilion built on a slight eminence, with a window looking into Mrs. Viljohn-Smythe's' back garden. In accordance with a plan of action he had laid down in his mind, Desmond took all his meals at his rooms.
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