Murray did not protest much when he saw how we took his suggestion; and Rosemary protested not at all. She simply sat still with a queer, fatal look on her beautiful face; and suspicions of her began to stir within me again. Did she not want to give her husband a chance of life?
The answer to that question, so far as Sir Beverley came into it, was that she could easily have influenced Murray not to heed us if she had been determined to do so. But that was just the effect she gave; lack of determination. It was as if, in the end, she wanted Murray to decide for himself, without being biassed by her.
"That Gaby Lorraine is in it somehow, all the same," I decided. "She was able to make Rosemary send us the telegram, and if we hadn't come over, and argued, she would have got her away."
It seemed rather sinister.
Ralston Murray was charmed with his heritage, and wanted Rosemary to show us all over the house, which she did. It was beautiful in its simple way: low-ceilinged rooms, many with great beams, and exquisite oak panelling of linen-fold and other patterns. But the fame of the Manor, such as it was, lay in its portraits and pictures by famous artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rosemary frankly confessed that she knew very little about Old Masters of any age; and Jim had been, as he said, in the same boat until the idea had struck him of renewing the past glories of the family place, Courtenaye Abbey. After renting the Abbey from me, and beginning to restore its dilapidations, he had studied our heirlooms of every sort; had bought books, and had consulted experts. Consequently, he had become as good a judge of a Lely, a Gainsborough, a Romney, a Reynolds, and so on, as I had become, through being my grandmother's grand-daughter.
I wondered what was in his mind as we went through the hall and the picture gallery, and began to be so excited over my own thoughts that I could hardly wait to find out his.
"Well, what is your impression of the famous collection?" I asked, the instant our car whirled us away from the door of Ralston Old Manor. "What do you think of everything?"
"Think, my child?" echoed Jim. "I'm bursting with what I think; and so, I expect, are you!"
"I wonder how long it is since the pictures were valued?" I muttered.
"I suppose they must have been done," said Jim, "at the time of old Ralston's death, so that the amount of his estate could be judged."