"Professor," he said, "and you, Walter Crease, and you, Jimmy
Post, if you're able to listen, listen to me.
You have played the part of children to-night. So surely as men
and women exist who live as you do, so surely must the law wait
upon their heels. You cannot cheat justice. It is as inexorable
as Time itself. When you try these little tricks, you simply
give another turn to the wheel, add another danger to life. You
had better learn to look upon me as necessary, all of you, for I
am certainly inevitable."
They passed backwards through the door, then they went down the
silent hall and out into the street. Even as they did so, the
clock struck a quarter to two.
"My friend Tavernake," Pritchard declared, lighting a cigarette
with steady fingers, "you are a man. Come into the club with me
while I bathe my forehead. After all, we'll have that drink
together before we say goodnight."
CHAPTER XX
A PLEASANT REUNION
Tavernake awoke some hours later with a puzzled sense of having
lost his own identity, of having taken up another man's life,
stepped into another man's shoes. From the day of his first
arrival in London, a raw country youth, till the night when he
had spoken to Beatrice on the roof of Blenheim House, nothing
that could properly be called an adventure had ever happened to
him. He had never for a moment felt the want of it; he had not
even indulged in the reading of books of romance. The thing
which had happened last night, as in the cold morning sunlight he
sat up in his bed, seemed to him a thing grotesque,
inconceivable.
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