"All the same, don't you think we'd better make sure there's still nobody hidden here?"
Again after a long pause, Bohun stalked ahead while they searched the pavilion, muttering to himself and holding the decanter tightly in the crook of his arm. The search did not take long. There were only four rooms in the pavilion, excluding a tiny cubicle with a garish gilt-leafed bath at the back of the bedroom. A narrow hall or anteroom ran the depth of the house. On one side were drawing-room and bedroom, on the other a music-room and an uncanny replica of a seventeenth-century private salon set out with rosewood card-tables. All of it was faded; but it was swept and garnished as though for ghosts. Under the dull yellow candle glow it was as though somebody had arranged a shrine.
But there was nobody there. And, as they could see by looking out of windows on each side of the house, nowhere was there any mark in the snow.
"I've had enough of this," said Bohun, when he had looked out the window of the card-room and turned sharply away. "Let's go up to the house and not act the fool any longer. It snowed again and effaced any tracks, that's all. Don't look so worried, man. Leave that to me. When I find the man who-"
His own nervousness, the jerking of his mouth and false brittle sarcasm of his look, was evident. He wheeled round. Bennett thought that he almost cried out when a faint voice rose outside, faint and insistent on the morning air, calling John Bohun's name.
CHAPTER FOUR
King Charles's Stair
"Hullo, there!" the voice continued, coming nearer.
They went out to the front door in time to see a big figure detach itself from the avenue of evergreens some ninety feet ahead, and stroll towards them at an unruffled pace. Jervis Willard. He was flicking powdery snow from the bushes with a stick. It was broad morning; but the light was shadowed by motionless dull-gray clouds, so that they saw him only as a dark shape with a pipe protruding from under the brim of a rakish black hat.
He stopped when he saw the two of them, and took the pipe out of his mouth.