Payment Deferred by C.S. Forester — Read

Mr. Marble was paying. He was paying by the feeling of weary misery from which he suffered as he walked that day across London Bridge, as he stood exhausted in the train, and in the bus which brought him from the station, and as he sat in the back room at 53 Malcolm Road.

It was a new habit this of sitting in the tiny "drawing-room" instead of the dining-room. In the drawing-room the light was bad and the furnishing even more dreary than in the dining-room, while the fact that it was in the dining-room that during the winter they had their fire had habituated the family to passing all their time there. But Mr. Marble now sat in the drawing-room. He did little enough there. He read, it is true, in the books that he now chose regularly from the Free Library -- crime books, even the interminable Lombroso -- but he only read at intervals. Quite half the time he spent in looking out of the window across the barren flowerbed. That way he felt more comfortable. He did not have to worry then in case some stray dog from one of the neighbouring houses were there. Mr. Marble had read how dogs are employed to find truffles in Perigord, and he was afraid.