“I shall not sleep,” she said, in a miserable broken voice. “I shall lie awake, thinking of you.”
He caught her swiftly in his arms, and kissed her on the lips. “If I find out the truth, nothing shall come between us then, Sisily?”
“No, nothing,” she said.
He turned with a sudden swift movement as though to go, but she still held him.
“Tell Thalassa … that I ask him to tell you the truth, if he knows it….”
She released him then, and stood looking after him as he walked from the room and out of the house.
Chapter XXVII
Flint House looked a picture of desolation in the chill grey day, wrapped in such silence that Charles’s cautious knock seemed to reverberate through the stillness around. But the knocking, repeated more loudly, aroused no human response. After waiting awhile the young man pulled the bell. From within the house a cracked and jangling tinkle echoed faintly, and then quivered into silence. He rang again, but there was no sound of foot or voice; no noise but the cries of the gulls overhead and the hoarse beat of the sea at the foot of the cliffs.
A cormorant, sitting on a rock near by, twisted its thin neck to stare fearlessly at the visitor. But Charles Turold was not thinking of cormorants. Where was Thalassa? Where was his wife? He believed they were still in Cornwall, but they might have left the house. He had been in London a long while. Not so long, though—only twelve days. Twelve days! Twelve eternities of unendurable hopelessness and loneliness, such as the damned might know. Was he to fail, now, after finding Sisily? He had a responsibility, a solemn duty. He had reached Cornwall safely from London—run the gauntlet of all the watching eyes of the police—and he would not go back without seeing Thalassa. His mind was thoroughly made up. He would find him, if he had to walk every inch of Cornwall in search of him. And when he found him he would wrest the truth out of him—yes, by God, he would! When he found him, but where was he to be found? The crafty old scoundrel might be in the house at that moment, lurking there like a wolf, perhaps grinning down at him from behind some closed window…. A sudden rage surged over him at that thought, and he fell savagely on the shut door, beating it with insensate fury with his fists. Damn him, he would force his way in!