Did she—know? he asked himself. Or was she ignorant of what it was she had with her?
It seemed to him that that question, hammering itself so awfully upon his mind and clamouring for an answer, must soon send him mad.
And still before him floated perpetually a picture of long, dark, lonely roads, of a rushing motor-car driven by a lovely girl, of the awful thing hidden in the car behind her.
Dully he recognized that the opportunity for which he had watched and waited so patiently had come and gone a dozen times, for Deede Dawson had now quite relaxed his former wary care.
It was as though he supposed all danger over, as though in the reaction after an enormous strain he could think of nothing but the immediate relief. He hardly gave a single glance at Dunn, whose faintest movement before had never escaped him. He had even put his pistol back in his pocket, and at almost any moment Dunn, with his unusual strength and agility, could have seized and mastered him.
But for such an enterprise Dunn had no longer any spirit, for all his mind was taken up by that one picture so clear in his thoughts of Ella in her great car driving the dead man through the night. “She must know,” he said to himself. “She must, or she would never have gone off like that at that time—she can't know, it's impossible, or she would never have dared.”
And again it seemed to him that this doubt was driving him mad.
Deede Dawson entered the house and got a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda-water and mixed himself a drink. For the first time since Ella's departure he seemed to remember Dunn's presence.
“Oh, there you are,” he said.
Dunn did not answer. He stood moodily on the threshold, wondering why he did not rush upon the other, and with his knee upon his chest, his hands about his throat, force him to answer the question that was still whispering, shouting, screaming itself into his ears: