"You're not the visitors I expected," he said with a laugh. "I've stayed in, waiting for Aspenick."
"Sir John won't come," said Jenny. "But I must speak to you—alone." She turned to me. "You're sure you don't mind, Austin?"
"Of course you must see him alone. Where shall I go?"
"Stay here," he said. "We'll go next door—in the study."
He held the door for her, and she went out. I heard them enter a room next to the one in which I was; the door was shut after them. Then for a long while I heard nothing more, except the murmur of the little river, which seemed loud to my unaccustomed ears, though probably people living in the house would soon cease to notice it.
Presently I heard their voices; his was so loud that, for fear of hearing the words, I had deliberately to abstract my mind by looking at this, that, and the other thing in the room—more spears and knives on the walls, books about his subject on the shelves, a couple of fine old silver tankards gleaming on the mantelpiece. The voices died down again just as I had exhausted the interest of the tankards, and taken in my hand a miniature which stood on the top of the marble clock.
His voice fell to inaudibility; the welcome silence left me alone with the little picture. It represented a child perhaps fourteen years old—a small, delicate face, dark in complexion, touched on the cheeks with a red flush, with large dark eyes, framed in plentiful black hair which curled about the forehead. Whoever the young girl was, she was beautiful; her eyes seemed to gaze at me from some remote kingdom of childish purity; her lips laughed that I should feel awe at her eyes. How in the world came she on Octon's mantelpiece?
Picked up somewhere for half a sovereign—as a pretty thing! That was the suggestion of common sense, in rebellion against a certain sense of over-strained nerves under which I was conscious of suffering. Yet, after all, Octon, like other men, must have kith and kin. The style of the picture was too modern for it to be his mother's. There were such things as sisters; but this did not look like Octon's stock. An old picture of a bygone sweetheart—that held the field as the likeliest explanation; well, except the one profanely offered by common sense. Octon was, to and for me, so much a part of Jenny's life and surroundings that it was genuinely difficult to realize him as a man with other belongings or associations; yet I could not but recognize that in all probability he had many—perhaps some apart from those which he might chance to have inherited.
Suddenly, through the wall, I heard a wail—surely I heard a little sob? The picture was instantly forgotten. I stood intensely awake, alert, watchful. If that sound came again, I determined that I would break in on their conference. For minutes I waited, but the sound came no more. I flung myself into a chair by the fire and began to smoke. I fell into a meditation. No further sound came to break it; the murmur of the river already grew familiar.
I heard a door open; the next moment they were in the room with me.