“Nor where to communicate with you, in case——?”
“No purpose would be served thereby. We have done what he desired of us, and there our duty to him ends. The rest lies between you and him.”
The surgeon, with a gesture which might have implied resignation or repudiation, turned his back. When he looked round again he was alone.
He made a movement towards the door, as if in a pretence to himself to recall his visitors, but stopped on the instant, biting his lip.
“I will not be such a hypocrite,” he muttered. He knew perfectly well, indeed, what was at the bottom of his heart—hope; a vague, indefinable feeling that all here was not as intimated; that out of the very strangeness and mystery of the affair might come profit and perhaps salvation to himself, a desperate man.
With a somewhat haggard face he moved on tiptoe to lock both the surgery door and that leading into the yard at the back. Then, feeling awed against his will, he turned to the hidden form.
It was still early morning, but the fog made a thick, dingy twilight in the room. Not a sound broke the dead stillness; nothing moved.
Yes, something—the thing under the cloth!
Was he overwrought—victim to some wild delusion? He could have sworn it; and yet the motion had been so slight, so hardly perceptible, it might have been the mere contraction or dilation of a shadow.
Again!