“Leaving Louis to shift for himself?”
“I leave him in the hands of Providence.”
“Yes, but Providence is not a lawyer.”
“Heaven forbid! God, you know, like no lawyer, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb—à brebis tondue Dieu mesure le vent. That is a good French proverb, and I am going to France in the faith of it.”
“But you will come back again?”
“Yes, I will come back. It will be all right about Louis—you will see.”
She did not answer. She had been holding him by the lapels of his coat, running her thumbs down the seams, and suddenly, feeling a little convulsive pressure there, he looked up in her face and saw that thick tears were running down her cheeks. Very softly but resolutely then he captured the two wandering hands and held them between his own.
“My dear,” he said, “my dear, I understand. But listen to this—have confidence in your friend the Baron.”
And on the morrow morning he left, accompanied by Mr. Vivian Bickerdike’s most private and most profound misgivings. That he was going to London on some business connected with the stolen document was that gentleman’s certain conviction. But what was he to do? Expose at once, or wait and learn more? On the whole it were better to wait, perhaps: the fellow was coming back—he had said so, and to the same unconsciousness of there being one on his track who at the right moment could put a spoke in his nefarious wheel.
He was still considering the question, when something happened which, for the time being, put all considerations but one out of his head. By the first post on the very morning of the inquiry he received, much to his astonishment, a subpœna binding him to appear and give evidence in Court. About what? If any uneasy suspicion in his mind answered that question, to it was to be attributed, no doubt, his rather white conscience-troubled aspect as he presently joined the party waiting to be motored over to the Castle in the old city where the case was to be tried.