Chapter Thirty.
Envoi.
John Seward Mervyn lay back in his accustomed armchair and puffed very contentedly at his pipe. The fire burned clearly in the deep, old-fashioned fireplace, and the room looked exactly the same as when we first discovered him in it. Even the wind, swirling boisterously around the gables of Heath Hover, seemed to sound the same note, but it was not snow-laden this time, for autumn had not yet fairly gone out. The same little black kitten, though it was no longer a kitten now, still it had grown not much larger, and was as fluffy and almost as playful as ever, had jumped up on to his knee and sat there purring.
“Fill up, Varne,” he said, pushing the square bottle over to his companion—the glow of glasses and syphons between them shone merrily in the cheerful lamplight. “And now—we can talk. No, it’s all right. She can’t hear,” following an almost imperceptible lift of the other’s eyebrows toward the ceiling, the sound of footsteps on the upper side of this betokening that Melian was undergoing the intricate and protracted process of feminine turning in.
Helston Varne, ensconced in the opposite chair, mixed himself a deliberate peg and relit his pipe. He was, in fact, more interested than—from force of habit—he allowed to appear, for now he was going to learn at first hand what he had pieced together in theory.
“First of all, tell me,” went on Mervyn. “I haven’t asked you yet, was purposely waiting until we got back here—on the very scene of it all, so to say. How did you get your cue to play up to on that Star business, when you were doing inquisitor-in-chief in that damnable hell-cave?”
“Mainly from deduction, I found the confirmation—here.”
“Here? How—when?” And remembering various manoeuvres of his own—here—Mervyn might well give way to amazement.
“You remember that day you came back from Clancehurst, and found me in the old lumber room. I had just discovered it then, and shoved back the old sideboard barely in time when you came in.”
“Good God!”