playing it as usual one morning when I came in from bathing and it seemed to me that he was extracting more hideous melancholy from it even than usual. Nor had my senses deceived me.
“Bertie,” he said in a hollow voice, skidding on the fourth crotchet from the left as you enter the second bar and producing a distressing sound like the death-rattle of a sand-eel, “I’ve seen her!”
“Seen her?” I said. “What, Elizabeth Vickers? How do you mean, you’ve seen her? She isn’t down here.”
“Yes, she is. I suppose she’s staying with relations or something. I was down at the post office, seeing if there were any letters, and we met in the doorway.”
“What happened?”
“She cut me dead.”