Tony Walker

He was waiting for her.

He'd been waiting an hour and a half in a dusty suburban lane, with a row of big elms on one side and some eligible building sites on the other, and far away to the southwest, the twinkling yellow lights of the Crystal Palace.

It was not quite like a country lane, for it had a pavement and lampposts, but it was not a bad place for a meeting all the same.

And farther up, towards the cemetery, it was really quite rural and almost pretty, especially in the twilight.

But twilight had long deepened into the night, and still he waited.

He loved her, and he was engaged to be married to her, with a complete disapproval of every reasonable person who had been consulted.

And this half-clandestine meeting was to-night to take the place of the grudgingly sanctioned weekly interview.

because a certain rich uncle was visiting at her house and her mother was not the woman to acknowledge to a moneyed uncle who might go off any day a match so deeply ineligible as hers with him so he waited for her and the chill of an unusually severe may evening entered into his bones

The policeman passed him with a surly response to his good night.

The bicyclists went by him like grey ghosts with foghorns, and it was nearly ten o'clock, and she had not come.

He shrugged his shoulders and turned towards his lodgings.

His road led him by her house, a desirable, commodious, semi-detached, and he walked slowly as he neared it.

She might even now be coming out, but she was not.

there was no sign of movement about the house no sign of life no lights even in the windows and her people were not early people he paused by the gate wondering

Then he noticed that the front door was open wide, and the street-clamp shone a little way into the dark hall.

There was something about all this that did not please him, that scared him a little, indeed.

The house had a gloomy and deserted air.

It was obviously impossible that it harboured a rich uncle.

The old man must have left early, in which case—

He walked up the path of patent-glazed tiles and listened.