“Good Lord, yes! There’s this terrible business to start with. Scotland Yard men in and out of the house like a jack-in-the-box! Never know where they won’t turn up next. Screaming headlines in every paper in the country⁠—damn all journalists, I say! Do you know there was a whole crowd staring in at the lodge gates this morning. Sort of Madame Tussaud’s chamber of horrors business that can be seen for nothing. Pretty thick, isn’t it?”

“Cheer up, John!” I said soothingly. “It can’t last forever.”

“Can’t it, though? It can last long enough for us never to be able to hold up our heads again.”

“No, no, you’re getting morbid on the subject.”

“Enough to make a man morbid, to be stalked by beastly journalists and stared at by gaping moon-faced idiots, wherever he goes! But there’s worse than that.”

“What?”

John lowered his voice: