They could get it from no other angle, and they could reconcile it with nothing they knew of their man. In view of subsequent events, their attitude at this moment is important.
Darling was quite five minutes in pulling himself together. Then he caught the doubt in Mayhan's eyes, and his first impulse was to explain—or try to. But on second thought, realizing that there was nothing for him to say, he ordered whisky and soda and held his peace. And no man asked a question.
The clock pointed to five to eleven. At ten past Colonel Darling left the club and walked to the hotel, which was less than a quarter of a mile away. But there his cowardice caught him again, and he paused at the gate of the compound.
The broad, shaded roadway was deserted, so that what followed went unobserved. Back and forth, torn by indecision, he irritably and fearsomely paced. For the uplift of his flagging, flaccid will he seemed likely to require either the Archimedean lever or the Archimedean screw.
Fifteen awful minutes dragged torturously by before, in sheer desperation, he entered the hotel and faced the clerk in charge, his card in his hand.
"Send that to the Visc—" he began, only to pull himself up with a sharp jolt.
The clerk in charge, not overburdened with wits, failed to catch the significance of the abbreviation. He only stared and waited.
"Send that to Mr. Mayhan's patient," corrected the colonel, the sweat beading on brow and chin, and turned to pace the floor as he had paced the roadway.
The wait, though seemingly interminable, ended too quickly for his wish, and his rap on the door of Mr. Scripps's room was hesitant and feeble.
There came in answer an inarticulate rumble, and an instant later across ten yards of floor space he gazed on the confronting Nibbetts, and paused, speechless. But the confronting Nibbetts—the nickname by which the Viscount Kneedrock had been best known to relatives and close friends—was eminently more composed.