“Stand back, please,” he ordered, authoritatively. “She’ll soon come round. But give her some air at any rate. What caused it?” he added to the sobbing, frightened girl. “She has had a shock of some sort.”
“She couldn’t have,” was the answer. “She—she—screamed and fell down. There was n-n-nothing to startle her—in fact, there was a strange gentleman standing there as if waiting for somebody. But he was a perfect stranger.”
All this Fordham—who had drawn out of the crowd and was out of sight, but not of hearing—caught. The doctor made no direct reply to the statement, though on the point of the utter unfamiliarity of the stranger’s appearance it is highly probable that he formed his own opinion.
“Let’s go and look at the visitors’ book,” suggested Wentworth. “I want to see if there’s any one I know.”
They strolled into the bureau and the book was produced. While Wentworth ran his eye attentively down the list of names, Fordham, standing behind him, hardly seemed to look at it. Anyhow, he evinced no interest whatever in the identity of anybody. But in reality the fact was the other way.
“The same name,” he said to himself. “The same name! That simplifies matters all round. Now I see daylight. At last—at last!”
Half an hour later Fordham strolled round to the village post-office and mailed a batch of letters. This was not in itself an extraordinary circumstance. But in the midst of that batch was one addressed to ‘Mrs Daventer,’ and he knew it would be delivered that same afternoon.
“What sort of a crowd at lunch, Fordham?” said Philip, as the door of his room opened to admit that worthy. “Any one new? Hullo, Wentworth! Where have you dropped from?”
“Oh, I’ve been around here about a week. But I say, Orlebar, it’s rather hard lines getting yourself knocked out of time this way.”
“Hard lines isn’t the word for it. And—what do you think? That confounded ass of a doctor says I sha’n’t be able to do any climbing this season. But he’s only a Swiss,” he added, with the youthful John Bull’s lordly contempt for talent or attainments encased in other than an Anglo-Saxon skull.