“I'll leave her where she is,” he decided again. “I can't help it; I mustn't run any risks. My first duty is to get the police here and have Deede Dawson arrested.”
He went down the stairs still deep in thought, and when he reached the landing below he would not even go to make sure that his captive was still secure.
An obscure feeling that he did not wish to see her, and still more that he did not wish her to see him, prevented him.
He descended the second flight of steps to the hall, taking fewer precautions to avoid making a noise and still very deep in thought.
For some time he had had but little hope that young Charley Wright still lived.
Nevertheless, the dreadful discovery he had made in the attic above had affected him profoundly, and left his mind in a chaos of emotions so that he was for the time much less acutely watchful than usual.
They had spent their boyhood together, and he remembered a thousand incidents of their childhood. They had been at school and college together. And how brilliantly Charley had always done at work and play, surmounting every difficulty with a laugh, as if it were merely some new and specially amusing jest!
Every one had thought well of him, every one had believed that his future career would be brilliant. Now it had ended in this obscure and dreadful fashion, as ends the life of a trapped rat.
Dunn found himself hardly able to realize that it was really so, and through all the confused medley of his thoughts there danced and flickered his memory of a young and lovely face, now tear-stained, now smiling, now pale with terror, now calmly disdainful.
“Can she have known?” he muttered. “She must have known—she can't have known—it's not possible either way.”