This House to Let

She shuddered. “Some other way than that.”

“I can give you some tabloids.”

“Is there any pain?” she queried.

“Hardly any.”

She shuddered again. “Hardly any. That does not sound very convincing.”

He proposed a third alternative. “You can come up to my room, and lie on the bed. I will paper up all the doors and cracks and turn up the gas. You will simply go to sleep and never wake.”

“That is the best,” she said.

“If we had plenty of time. But they may take us in a few minutes. Bryant has seen your husband, he will not wait long after that interview.”

“The tabloids, then,” she said firmly.

Yes, it had come to this, she must cheat the law. Twice, she had had her chance, once as the wife of Jack Pomfret, again as the wife of Guy Spencer. And twice had the cup of triumph been snatched from her lips.

She must die, like a rat in a hole, in this obscure little cottage at Strand-on-the-Green, in the company of the man who had always been her evil genius.

Dutton went across to a small cupboard built in the wall of the shabby parlour, and brought out a little bottle filled with capsules. He extracted one and handed it to the shrinking woman.

“Take yours first, dear, I will take mine after.” There was a look of infinite compassion in the scoundrel’s face as he offered it to her.

Bravely she took it, and swallowed it with a great gulp, sitting in the shabby easy-chair. The effect was almost instantaneous, and when Dutton had made sure that she was beyond human aid, he took a similar tabloid himself, with the same result.

An hour later there was a thundering knock at the door of the cottage. One of the detectives had gone to a telephone office and informed Bryant that the woman had come to Strand-on-the-Green, and was with Dutton. The order came back from Bryant, who had only stayed a few minutes at Eaton Place, that the pair were to be arrested at once.

Of course there was no response. After waiting for a few moments, the men broke in the frail door. But they were too late.

Norah Burton, and the man who had been so long associated with her – brother, cousin, lover, whatever he might be – had gone to their judgment.

It was a nine-days’ wonder, and while his friends and acquaintances were still discussing it at clubs and over tea-tables, Guy Spencer slipped quietly abroad. When he returned to England, at the end of twelve months, these tragic happenings had become little more than a memory to his world.

He stayed a week with the Southleighs at their ancestral home in Sussex, and at the end of that week their friends read an important announcement in The Morning Post: —

“A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between Mr Guy Spencer and his cousin, Lady Nina, only daughter and child of the Earl of Southleigh.”

The End