THE BETTER SORT
that stayed any word on the lips of either. A sound reached their ears, as yet unheeded, the sound of news boys in the great thoroughfare shouting "extra-specials" and mingling with the shout a catch that startled them. The expression in their eyes quickened as they heard, borne on the air, "Mysterious Disappearance———!" and then lost it in the hubbub. It was easy to complete the cry, and Bight himself gasped. "Beadel-Muffet? Confound them!"
"Already?" Maud had turned positively pale.
"They've got it first—be hanged to them!"
Bight gave a laugh—a tribute to their push—but her hand was on his arm for a sign to listen again. It was there, in the raucous throats; it was there, for a penny, under the lamps and in the thick of the stream that stared and passed and left it. They caught the whole thing—"Prominent Public Man!" And there was something brutal and sinister in the way it was given to the flaring night, to the other competing sounds, to the general hardness of hearing and sight which was yet, on London pavements, compatible with an interest sufficient for cynicism. He had been, poor Beadel, public and prominent, but he had never affected Maud Blandy at least as so marked with this character as while thus loudly committed to extinction. It was horrid—it was tragic; yet her lament for him was dry. "If he's gone I'm dished."
"Oh, he's gone—now," said Bight.
"I mean if he's dead."
"Well, perhaps he isn't. I see," Bight added, "what you do mean. If he's dead you can't kill him."
"Oh, she wants him alive," said Maud.
"Otherwise she can't chuck him?"
To which the girl, however, anxious and wondering, made no direct reply. "Good-bye to Mrs. Chorner. And I owe it to you."
"Ah, my love!" he vaguely appealed.
368
