"And do you know," Martin demanded, "what she said to me? Listen!"
Whereupon they both stopped and looked at each other, conscious of a meeting of minds.
"Let's face it sir," Masters said benevolently, and lowered his defences. "There may be trouble."
And the richest and ripest trouble of all, as regards proceedings between Sir Henry Merrivale and the Dowager Countess of Brayle, had its first stir at eleven o'clock on the following morning.
Chapter 17
It was nearly eleven before Martin finished his breakfast on Monday morning. When he turned in the night before, he had been too tired to bother with the sleeping-pill Dr. Laurier had left for him. He woke to a morning of soft breeze and gentle sun, so stimulated and refreshed that he felt ravenous for food. Certain instructions, which H.M. had made him promise to carry out overnight, now seemed nonsensical.
Martin sang in his bath. A harassed but punctilious Dr. Laurier, who arrived while he was shaving, changed the bandage on his forehead and told him that with luck the stitches would be out in no time.
Somebody had tried to kill him? But he had only to think of Jenny, and other matters for the moment seemed of no consequence. When he went downstairs, he met nobody in the cool house. In the dining-room he was served breakfast by a maid other than Phyllis; and, since Fleet House was supplied with great quantities of food from an unspecified source, he ate with appetite.
But it was the telephone he wanted. Emerging through a series of passages which brought him out opposite the staircase' at the back of the main hall, Martin at last heard sounds of life. Voices — apparently those of Aunt Cicely, Ricky, and H.M. himself — drifted down from the direction of the drawing-room.
Then the 'phone rang; and it was Jenny.