The Cinema Murder

the steamer, long lines of passengers were stretched in wicker chairs, smoking and drinking their coffee, but where he was no one came save an occasional promenader. Yet even here was a dis

ho knew life had any care save for the measure of their own days. Some freakish thought pleaded stridently his own justification. His mind travelled back down the gloomy avenues of his past, along those last aching years of grinding and undeserved poverty. He remembered his upbringing, his widowed mother, a woman used to every luxury, struggling to make both ends meet in a suburban street, in a hired cottage filled with hired furniture. He remembered his schooldays, devoid of pocket money, unable to join in the sports of others, slaving with melancholy perseverance for a scholarship to lighten his mother's burden. Always there was the same ghastly, crushing penuriousness, the struggle to make a living before his schooldays were well over, the unbought books he had fingered a

sheltered spot while he lit a cigarette, and paced up and down the more freque

mine for a few minutes, won't you? Mr. Greene has rushed off to the smoking room. I think he has ju

lf without hesitatio

sighed. "To have work in life which one loves a

But you are a manufacturer, are you not

kly. "I mean that I wonder I h

re a very

art in life. I am on my way to new things. Do you think, Miss Dalstan, t

gainst the background of empty spaces, the pale soft

hat these new things might be which you desire. For

he persisted. "Supposing one wanted to develop

the one place in the world," she tol

es

sure," she continued. "T

e written a play and three stories, so bad that no

rought them

ok his

ere I shall neve

again?" she re

e idea is still with me. I think that I shall rewrite them when I have settled down in America. I fancy that I shall find myself in

d sometimes to escape

down along the row of chairs. There were one or two slumbering

till very low, "why I left the sal

he de

y had upon you; because I, also, was in that train, and I have better eyesight

" he m

nothing to

thi

ed for a

de me that you lingered underneath that br

t going to tell you a lie, but apart from that I admit

derful, cool and soft and somehow reassuring. He felt a sens

and forget it. Fate makes queer uses of all of us sometimes. She sends her noblest sons down into the shadows and pitchfor

Is it your voice, I wonder, that is

ed reass

told him, "and a friend who, even if she does not

that I deserved

hed almo

d just what we deserved!… Now give me your arm. I want to walk a little. While we wal

aves. She weighed and measured his criticisms of the plays they spoke of, and in the main approved of them. When at last she stopped outside the companionway and bade him good night, the deck was almost deserted. They were near one of the electric light

she said firmly. "Those a

n and peculiar gifts of apprehension. She left him, too, with a curious sense of restfulness, as though suddenly he had become metamorphosed into the woman and had found a sorely-needed guardian. He abandoned without a second thought his