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When he had finished he looked at his companion expectantly, but Barrant's eyes were coldly official. "A strange story!" he said. "A true one," Charles eagerly rejoined. "Thalassa has been walking along the coast ever since in the expectation of finding this man. He will kill him if he meets him."
At that stage of his reasoning he did not ask himself whether worldly greed was likely to enter into the composition of a girl like Sisily. This reconstruction of the crime pointed to an accomplice, and that accomplice must have been the man-servant. Nobody but Thalassa could have let the girl into the house; and he could have dropped the key in the room after the door was broken open.
Some women would have taken to drink, others to religion. Mrs. Thalassa sought consolation in two packs of diminutive and dog-eared cards. Her shattered spirit found something inexpressibly soothing in the intricacies of patience: in the patchwork of colour, the array of sequences, the sudden discovery of an overlooked move, the dear triumph of a hard-won game.
Nearly an hour passed before they heard the sound of a guarded knock at the front door. Dr. Ravenshaw went and opened it. Austin Turold was standing on the threshold. "This is bad news, doctor," he said, stepping quickly inside. "I came ahead of the others walked over. Thalassa is waiting at the churchtown for the sergeant, who is away on some official business, but expected back shortly.
Thalassa remembered all these things; he remembered also how startled they were, the three of them, at the unexpected sound of a kind of throaty chuckle near by, and turned in affright to see a large bird regarding them from the shadow of the rocks a sea bird with rounded wings, light-coloured plumage, and curiously staring eyes above a yellow beak.
In a few minutes the car was clear of the town, and running at an increased pace through the gusty darkness of the moors. With a face grimly immobile as the carved head of a heathen god, Thalassa stood at the front door watching the departure of Sisily and her aunt until the car was lost to sight in a dip of the moors.
On arriving at the "other place" they made their way to its east coast, which was the starting point of their journey to the island. From a brown man living on the coast Thalassa hired a smart little ketch which the three of them could easily handle, and in this they embarked for the island from a beach which curved like a white tusk around a blue bay.
Thalassa came for me with the news of my brother's death, and I did not get back from Flint House until very late." "I suppose you are aware your sister does not share your view that your brother committed suicide?" "I understand she has some absurd suspicion about Thalassa, my brother's servant." "Why do you call her suspicion absurd?" asked Barrant cautiously.
A faint ray of light flickered from the kitchen window on the giant cliffs, like a taper from a doll's house. He approached the window by a line of rocks which guarded it like sentinels, and looked in. Within, Mrs. Thalassa sat alone by the table in a drooping attitude of dejection or stupor.
She came running downstairs, her eyes staring and blazing. 'Thalassa, dear Thalassa, for pity's sake let me out, she said half-sobbing. 'Oh, what did I come for? He's wicked wicked. Twasn't for me to say anything between father and daughter, so I just opened the door without a word, and went out with her." "What time did Sisily catch the wagonette?" "That's what I don't know.
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