XV
SHEER IMPUDENCE
Though it had been nearly eight when they entered the restaurant, it was something after eleven before Lanyard called for his bill.
"We've plenty of time," he had explained; "it'll be midnight before we can move. The gentle art of house-breaking has its technique, you know, its professional ethics: we can't well violate the privacy of Madame Omber's strong-box before the caretakers on the premises are sound asleep. It isn't done, you know, it isn't class, to go burglarizing when decent, law-abiding folk are wide-awake. … Meantime we're better off here than trapezing the streets. …"
It's a silent web of side ways and a gloomy one by night that backs up north of Les Halles: old Paris, taciturn and sombre, steeped in its memories of grim romance. But for infrequent, flickering, corner lamps, the street that welcomed them from the doors of the warm and cosy restaurant was as dismal as an alley in some city of the dead. Its houses with their mansard roofs and boarded windows bent their heads together like mutes at a wake, black-cloaked and hooded; seldom one showed a light; never one betrayed by any sound the life that lurked behind its jealous blinds.
