United States or Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He either followed us here or has been waiting to see if we came. I should have foreseen this." A flicker of unusual agitation on Colwyn's calm face increased Caldew's mental confusion. "I don't understand," he stammered. "He Nepcote why should he be watching us?" "Because he penetrated the truth last night. He knew he was in danger." "But why should he follow us here?"
Colwyn slowly paced up and down the room in the midnight silence, conning all the facts over again in the light of this overlooked incident. The three dined together in the big dining-room almost in silence. Musard and Philip Heredith had not returned until after six, and their first knowledge of Colwyn's presence was by some oversight deferred until they met at the dinner table.
Although Colwyn's memory instantly recognised the watermark on the paper, he could not, for the moment, recollect where he had seen it, though it seemed as familiar to him as the face of some old acquaintance whose name he had temporarily forgotten.
Those events, as he described them, took on a new complexion to his listener, suggesting a deeper and more complex mystery than the newspaper accounts of the crime. From the first the moat-house murder had appealed to Colwyn's imagination and stimulated his intellectual curiosity. There was the pathos of the youth and sex of the victim, murdered in a peaceful country home.
Colwyn's old friends urged with great vigor, was ascribed by her chiefly to the hostile influences of Wyvis Brand, and she made a point of being openly uncivil to that gentleman when, on fine mornings, he brought his boy to Gwynne Street or fetched him away on a bright afternoon.
She passed a melancholy evening with the children melancholy in spite of herself, for she did her best to be cheerful and spent a sleepless night, rising in the morning with a bad headache and a conviction as of the worthlessness of all things which she did not very often experience. She shrank sensitively from going to Mrs. Colwyn's room.
Nepcote's statement on the previous night had led him to believe that Philip Heredith had suspected Nepcote's relations with his wife, but could not bring himself to disclose that when he sought assistance. It was Colwyn's experience that nothing was so rare as complete frankness from people who came to him for help.
Colwyn's door, another a brougham this time was driven up. "The Colwyns must be having a party," said a rather censorious neighbor, who was sitting with a friend in the bow-window of the next house. "Or else they are having very fine pupils indeed." "That's not a pupil," said her companion, craning forward to get a better view of the visitor; "that's Lady Ashley, Sir Philip Ashley's mother.
"There are children in the house they may develop measles or chicken-pox at any moment you never know when children of that class are free from infection. And I heard an odd report about Mrs. Colwyn's habits the other day. Oh, I think it is too great a risk." But when she said as much after Janetta's departure, she found Margaret for once recalcitrant.
He wished to know more of the man of whom he had heard so much by repute, and he believed that tobacco promoted sociability. He also desired to find out whether Colwyn's presence at the moat-house meant that Phil had succeeded in impressing him with his own belief in the innocence of Hazel Rath. Colwyn willingly agreed.
Word Of The Day