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Updated: June 28, 2025
"To-morrow evening will suit me as well as any other," she acquiesced, after a brief pause. "At eight o'clock, then number 10 b, Hill Street," Hilditch concluded. Francis bowed and turned away with a murmured word of polite assent. Outside, he found Wilmore deep in the discussion of the merits of various old brandies with an interested maitre d'hotel. "Any choice, Francis?" his host enquired.
Wilmore glanced at his watch. "What about moving on somewhere?" he suggested. "We might go into the Alhambra for half-an-hour, if you like. The last act of the show is the best." Francis shook his head. "We've got to see this thing out," he replied. "Have you forgotten that our friend promised us a sensation before we left?" Wilmore began to laugh a little derisively.
There was a moment's silence. Wilmore was leaning forward in his place, studying the newcomer earnestly. An impatient invective was somehow stifled upon Francis' lips.
He left the pair with a ruffling breeze, and a sky all sail, prepared, it seemed to him, to enjoy the most delicious you-and-I on salt water that a sailor could dream of; and placidly envying, devoid of jealousy, there was just enough of fancy quickened in Lieutenant Wilmore to give him pictures of them without disturbance of his feelings one of the conditions of the singular visitation we call happiness, if he could have known it.
"I still don't see where Ledsam's worry comes in," the legal luminary remarked. "The fact that the man was guilty is rather a feather in the cap of his counsel. Shows how jolly good his pleading must have been." "Just so," Wilmore agreed, "but Ledsam, as you know, is a very conscientious sort of fellow, and very sensitive, too. The whole thing was a shock to him."
What there is to be done falls to my lot." "Had the police anything to say about it?" Wilmore asked. "Only a few words," Francis replied. "Shopland has it in hand. A good man but unimaginative. I've come across him in one or two cases lately.
"But," continued she, "Lord Wilmore had a family or friends, he must have known some one, can we not " "Oh, it is useless to inquire," returned the count; "perhaps, after all, he was not the man you seek for. He was my friend: he had no secrets from me, and if this had been so he would have confided in me." "And he told you nothing?" "Not a word." "Nothing that would lead you to suppose?"
"I thought you looked as though you'd been seeing spooks," Wilmore murmured sympathetically. "I have seen a spook," Francis rejoined, with almost passionate seriousness, "a spook who lifted an invisible curtain with invisible fingers, and pointed to such a drama of horrors as De Quincey, Poe and Sue combined could never have imagined. Oliver Hilditch was guilty, Andrew.
From sheer purposelessness he wandered back again into the hall, and here came his first gleam of returning sensation. He came face to face with his most intimate friend, Andrew Wilmore. The latter, who had just hung up his coat and hat, greeted him with a growl of welcome. "So you've brought it off again, Francis!" "Touch and go," the barrister remarked. "I managed to squeak home."
Andrew Wilmore rose slowly to his feet and emerged from behind the sheets of an evening paper. He laid his hand upon the shoulder of a friend, and glanced towards the door. "Ledsam's had a touch of nerves," he confided. "There's been nothing else the matter with him. We've been down at the Dormy House at Brancaster and he's as right as a trivet now. That Hilditch affair did him in completely."
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