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Updated: June 25, 2025
She knew that he was at Shapley and looked it up in the telephone directory. If that were the explanation, then she certainly would not give away the secret of his hiding-place. Still he was haunted by a great dread the whole of that night. The Sparrow had told him he had acted foolishly in leaving his place of concealment in Kensington.
"But the reason I wanted to get in touch with you is that the police went to Shapley." "To Shapley!" gasped Benton. "Yes. They went there the night you left London. Evidently somebody has given you away!" "Given me away! Who in the devil's name can it be? If I get to know who the traitor is I I'll by gad, I'll kill him. I swear I will!" "Who knows? Some secret enemy of yours no doubt.
The letter was from Mite Shapley, but Rose could read only half of it to Mrs. Brooks, little beside the news that the Waterman barn, the finest barn in the whole township, had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground.
It did not seem possible that Howell should have told Scotland Yard that he was hiding at Shapley; yet it was quite evident that both mademoiselle and her companion were equally in fear of the man Howell, whose real name was Hamilton Shaw. The theory seemed to him a thin one, for Howell was The Sparrow's intimate friend.
Any police inquiry at Shapley would certainly be most unwelcome to her, and she blamed herself for agreeing to Benton's proposal that Hugh should stay there. "Benton will be back to-morrow," Hugh said. "Do you think it safe for me to remain here till then?" he added anxiously. "I hardly know what to think," replied the woman. She herself had a haunting dread of recognition as Molly Maxwell.
Only recently a sum of a quarter of a million francs had fallen into her hands, and with it she now rented Shapley Manor and had set up as a country lady. Benton gazed around the fine old room with its Adams ceiling and its Georgian furniture, and reflected how different were Molly's present surroundings from that stuffy little flat au troisieme in the Rue Racine. "Yes," he said.
She gazed abstractedly out of the window over the beautiful panorama to where Hindhead rose abruptly in the blue distance. The view from the moss-grown terrace at Shapley, high upon the Hog's back, was surely one of the finest within a couple of hundred miles of London. Since Mrs.
Almira, otherwise "Mite," Shapley had been in her room the afternoon before and disturbed with her careless hand the pattern of Rose's pins. They were kept religiously in the form of a Maltese cross; and if, while she was extricating one from her clothing, there had been an alarm of fire, Rose would have stuck the pin in its appointed place in the design, at the risk of losing her life.
Bond rose from the settee and went to the telephone in the library, where she heard the voice of a female telephone operator. "Is that Shapley Manor?" she asked. "I have a telegram for Mrs. Bond. Handed in at Nice at two twenty-five, received here at four twenty-eight. 'To Bond, Shapley Manor, near Guildford. Yvonne shot by some unknown person while with Hugh. In grave danger.
Rose was distinctly apathetic, and Mite Shapley departed after a very brief call, leaving behind her an entirely new train of thought. If Claude Merrill were so love-blighted that he could only by the greatest self-control keep from flinging himself into the river, how could he conceal his sufferings so completely from Mite Shapley, little shallow-pated, scheming coquette?
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