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"That's enough," he said, waving me back, and I saw that his hand was shaking, too, like Keredec's. His face had grown very white; but he controlled himself to speak with a coolness that made what he said painfully convincing. "I know what you think," he went on, addressing me, "but you're wrong. It isn't for myself.
Saffren, I can guess no more than I can guess the cause of Keredec's fears, but the moment I saw him to-day, saw that he'd come back, I knew it was THAT, and tried to draw him out. You heard what he said; there's no doubt that Saffren stands in danger of some kind. It may be inconsiderable, or even absurd, but it's evidently imminent, and no matter what it is, Mrs. Harman must be kept out of it.
I was unable to resist the opportunity, and, affecting considerable surprise, interrupted him with the apparently guileless query: "Why, how did you know that?" Professor Keredec's laughter rumbled again, growing deeper and louder till it reverberated in the woods and a hundred hale old trees laughed back at him. "Ho, ho, ho!" he shouted. "But you shall not take me for a window- curtain spy!
At the time, I did not connect him even remotely with Professor Keredec's anxieties. I imagined he might have an eye to the spoons; but it's as ridiculous to think him a burglar as it would be to take him for a detective. What he is, or what he has to do with Mr.
Ward cried incredulously. "Oh, monstrous!" "No," I answered. "Only insane. Not because there is anything lacking in Oliver in Harman, I mean for I think that will be righted in time, but because the second marriage makes it a useless cruelty that he should have been allowed to fall in love with his first wife again. Yet that was Keredec's idea of a 'beautiful restoration, as he calls it!"
Sometimes there came over his face a look of importunate wistfulness and distressed perplexity, and he seemed on the point of breaking out with something that he wished to tell me or to ask me, for it might have been a question but he always kept it back. Keredec's training seldom lost its hold upon him.
Yet here they are ha! forever!" "But it doesn't look like sunshine," said Oliver Saffren hesitatingly, stating a disconcerting but incontrovertible truth; "it only seems to look like it because isn't it because it's so much brighter than the rest of the picture? I doubt if paint CAN look like sunshine." He turned from the sketch, caught Keredec's gathering frown, and his face flushed painfully.
They returned after an hour or so, entering the inn with the same appearance of haste to be out of sight, the professor always talking, "with the manner of an orator, but in English." Nevertheless, Amedee remarked, it was certain that Professor Keredec's friend was neither an American nor an Englishman. "Why is it certain?" I asked.
What do you know about them?" "Nothing," answered the other humbly. A profound rumbling was heard, and the frown disappeared from Professor Keredec's brow like the vanishing of the shadow of a little cloud from the dome of some great benevolent and scientific institute. He dropped a weighty hand on his young friend's shoulder, and, in high good-humour, thundered: "Then you are a critic!
And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased Professor Keredec's mind in regard to them.
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