Oh, he always had offered rewards, of
course--had ever so liberally pasted the windows of his soul with
staring appeals, minute descriptions, promises that knew no bounds.
But the actual recovery of the article--the business of drawing and
crossing the cheque, blotched though this were with tears of joy--had
blankly appeared to him rather in the light of a sacrilege, casting,
he sometimes felt, a palpable chill on the fervour of the next quest.
It was just this fervour that was threatened as, raising himself on
his elbow, he stared at the foot of his bed. That his eyes refused
to rest there for more than the fraction of an instant, may be
taken--_was_, even then, taken by Keith Tantalus--as a hint of his
recollection that after all the phenomenon wasn't to be singular. Thus
the exact repetition, at the foot of Eva's bed, of the shape pendulous
at the foot of _his_ was hardly enough to account for the fixity with
which he envisaged it, and for which he was to find, some years later,
a motive in the (as it turned out) hardly generous fear that Eva had
already made the great investigation "on her own." Her very regular
breathing presently reassured him that, if she _had_ peeped into "her"
stocking, she must have done so in sleep. Whether he should wake her
now, or wait for their nurse to wake them both in due course, was
a problem presently solved by a new development.
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