Derrick reached for his pipe. “Yes, that’s what I told him, but now I think he’s in the cottage. He does not want to go further from the house than that. I don’t know why, but I know.”
She sent him a look like that of an animal in a trap and left the room. Derrick sucked at his pipe, pitching his mind back over the last half-hour, piecing together fragment after fragment of evidence, but groping in vain for some underlying fact. Incident and strange coincident, shuffle them as he might, they made no decipherable pattern. Then, as happened so often, his eyes wandered to the portrait of Millicent.
“Is it all right,” he said, half aloud, “you whom I have never seen? You know why I am trying, but I do not. It’s all clear on your side, but misty on mine. Is it only for a little longer, till you find rest and sleep—for till then will there be no peace for me?”
“Jack,” sounded a voice at the door, “who on earth are you talking to?”
He started and laughed awkwardly. “Come in, Edith; I thought you were asleep long ago.”
“I couldn’t get to sleep, so thought I would come and see you. Why this oration to an empty room?”
He hooked his arm into hers, led her across, and halted under the portrait.
“I want you to help me do something for that chap.”
She looked at him regretfully. “There’s no reason in you at all, and just when I had persuaded myself that everything was all right.”
“I admit it sounds ridiculous, but really it’s not. I was never more serious in my life.”