“But don’t you want to see Lanty?”
“Perhaps I’d better not worry him to-night. I’ll be ready for him when he wants me, poor old man! Please take me home.” His voice was very weak, and she felt him heavy on her arm. “You might, you know. You’re not the only lonely pebble on the beach!”
Harriet blushed again, but without anger, this time. Wiggie had known, all along, and the thought had never hurt her or made her ashamed. And no matter where his own love was placed, he yet had an urgent need of herself. She remembered how he had turned to Wild Duck as his refuge. It was queerly pleasant to be needed. She would take him home.
They got him back to the car with some difficulty, and, once inside, he lay against the cushions so still that she was afraid, until she found that he had simply fallen into exhausted sleep. He had spent all his little store of strength in coming to her in the dark hour when she had deliberately shut herself out of Heaven. It was strange that he should always be digging her out of deep places. It seemed almost like fate.
The Rur’l D’trict C’cillor drew the rug more closely round him with an oddly-motherly touch.
There was indeed a vile smell of gas in the office, and an unlighted fire, astonishingly badly laid, showed yesterday’s cinders still unraked. A perfect sea of newspapers heaved along the floor, and across them Lanty’s boots had trodden a path to his desk at the far end, where his private documents had been swept aside to make room for more Gazettes. A large island of stickphast sat smugly upon the fine leather. The shelves had been ruthlessly rifled. Cupboard doors stood open. The newspapers themselves, evidently long folded away with neat precision, had been crushed and crumpled, slashed or torn across. For a second, Dandy forgot her nervousness in sheer amazed horror.
Lanty was standing by the desk, with one of the myriad sheets in his hand, looking down at it with a still intentness and absorption. When he heard the door he lifted his head without turning, clutching the paper close as if afraid that somebody might see it over his shoulder.
“Who is it?” he asked, still with the air of being on guard, and Dandy of the Tray, in a faint and rather frightened voice, wishing herself safely back at Watters answered: “Our Agnes!” The silver spoon clinked against the bowl.
Lanty had been well-trained by weekly nightmare meals to the stern remembrance of the “girl’s night out,” but in the present stress of circumstance his weary brain had again let slip the important fact. The voice might easily have belonged to Our Agnes, who boasted an organ varying between the colourless twitter of a new-fledged sparrow and the discordance of the tom-tom. It certainly carried no faintest reminder of Dandy. Moreover, in his passionate concentration upon the paper, yielding to it entire heart and soul and quickened, yearning memory, Dandy was as if she had never been.