“I march with the first detachment,” declared Paula hardily. “I shall accept your offer of transportation, Mr. Ducie, if the auto does not come first.”
Floyd-Rosney thought this must surely be Adrian Ducie, and not his brother. For some reason of their own they must have exchanged their missions, and Randal had gone down the river, leaving his brother here. For she—a stickler on small points of the appropriate—could never say this if it were her old lover. Her sense of decorum, her respect for her husband, her habitual exercise of good taste would alike forbid the suggestion. Doubtless, it was Adrian Ducie.
“I don’t think an automobile will come,” remarked Ducie. “The roads are very rough between here and Volney.”
Paula’s next words seemed to mend the matter a trifle in Floyd-Rosney’s estimation.
“I think we have all had enough of Duciehurst for one time! I would not risk remaining here, as evening closes in, for any consideration. All the riverside harpies will be flocking here when this story of treasure trove is bruited abroad. The old place will be fairly torn stone from stone, and there will be horrible orgies of strife and bloodshed. There ought to be a guard set, though there is nothing now to guard.”
“Do you suppose Captain Treherne’s story of the river pirates was all fact or was partly the effect of his hallucination?” Ducie asked.
“The cords he was bound with were pretty circumstantial evidence,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, not waiting, as usual, for her husband’s word, but taking the lead in the conversation with aplomb and vivacity—he remembered scornfully that before her marriage she had been accounted in social circles intellectual, a bel esprit among the frivols.
“The gag failed of its function of silence,” she continued, “it told the whole story. You would have known that it was stern truth if you had seen it.”
Floyd-Rosney vacillated once more.
“This must be Randal Ducie,” he thought, “for Adrian was present at the liberation of Captain Treherne—indeed, he was with the group searching among the series of ruined vacant apartments when the prisoner was discovered.”