‘Oh,’ said another, ‘there can’t be no mortal shadder of a doubt who done it.’
For a moment these cruel words turned her faint; but the swift reaction of certainty and resolve which followed them nerved her and braced her for all the troublous times to come. She waited calmly until all had been done that could be done. Then when the doctor had left his patient, she took him apart.
‘My brother has been wounded by a pistol shot?’ she asked him very bravely and steadily. The doctor nodded. ‘I must find out who did it,’ she went on, looking him full in the face with her hazel eyes.
‘The people here seem to suspect a Mr. ———’
She snatched the word out of the doctor’s mouth.
‘My brother’s dearest friend, sir. Why, sir, they would have died for each other.’
‘As you would for one of them?’ said the doctor to himself.
‘You have experience in these matters, sir. Will you help me to examine the boat? There may perhaps be something there to help us to track the criminal.’
The doctor had but the poorest opinion of this scheme. ‘But, yes,’ he said, he would go, and then fell to thinking aloud. ‘Poor thing. Wonderfully plucky. Bears it well. Brother half killed. Lover suspected. Go! Of course I’ll go. Why the devil shouldn’t I?’ And he marched along unconscious of his utterances or of the heightened colour and the look of momentary surprise in Lilian’s face. ‘Pretty girl, too,’ said the doctor, in audible thought. ‘Devilish pretty! Good girl, I should fancy. Like the looks of her. Hard lines, poor thing—hard lines!’
They reached the bank and walked across the punt into the house-boat. As she entered the door Lilian gave a cry, and dashed at the table; then turned and held up before the doctor’s eyes a meerschaum pipe—the identical Antoletti meerschaum stolen in the Stamboul Bazaar by Demetri Agryopoulo.