And in performing this small duty I made a discovery. As he preceded me down-stairs I remembered seeing the back of his head once before. It was the kind of head not easily forgotten. Moreover, I had seen it in circumstances that had caused me to note it in particular. Where and when and how were details that did not at once return to me; but I knew that the association was sinister.
As I returned from my mission in showing him to the door I heard Vio speaking.
"Come in here, Billy. There’s something I want to say."
She was still behind the tea-table, pensive rather than subdued, resolute rather than unhappy.
"I liked your talking like that," she began at once, without looking up at me. "It’s—it’s the way we shall have to play the game."
A box of cigarettes stood on the tea-table. I took one and struck a match, the usual stage-trick for gaining a little time.
"What game do you mean?" I asked, when I had carefully blown out the match and deposited it in an ash-tray.
"What game can I mean but—but that of your coming back?"
"Only in the sense of giving us something to play. We can’t just—just live it."
With a quick movement she was on her feet, flinging out her hands.
"For all the reasons that I should think you’d see." She came and stood on the hearth-rug, confronting me. "Billy, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of what I’m doing for your sake?"
"I’ve more than the faintest idea, Vio. Some day, when we’re able to talk more easily than we are as yet, I shall tell you how grateful I am. Just now I’m—I’m rather dazed. I have to get my bearings—"
She, too, had taken a cigarette, lighting it nervously, carelessly, puffing rapidly at the thing and moving about the room.
"And there’s another thing," she began, taking no notice of what I was trying to say; "I don’t mind your talking as you did just now, so long as it’s—as it’s through your hat; but if it isn’t—"
"That’s just what I was afraid of. In the places where you’ve been—I don’t want to know anything about them," she interjected, with a passionate gesture of the hand that held the cigarette, "but in such places men do pick up revolutionary ideas, just as they do in prisons!"
"I don’t know that it’s a question of getting revolutionary ideas, Vio, so much as it’s one of living in a revolutionary world."