Dunn rose without answering, made his toilet by shaking off some of the dust that clung to him, and followed his new employer out of the tool-house into the open air.
It was a fresh and lovely morning, and coming towards them down one of the garden paths was Ella, looking as fresh and lovely as the morning in a dainty cotton frock with lace at her throat and wrists.
That she could possibly have spent the night tearing across country in a powerful car conveying a dead man to an unknown destination, appeared to Dunn a clean impossibility, and for a moment he almost supposed he had been mistaken in thinking he recognized her voice.
But he knew he had not, that he had made no mistake, that it had indeed been Ella he had seen dash away into the darkness on her strange and terrible errand.
“Oh, my daughter,” said Deede Dawson carelessly, noticing Dunn's surprise. “Oh, yes, she's back—you didn't expect to see her this morning. Well, Ella, Dunn's surprised to see you back so soon, aren't you, Dunn?”
Dunn did not answer, for a kind of vertigo of horror had come upon him, and for a moment all things revolved about him in a whirling circle wherein the one fixed point was Ella's gentle lovely face that sometimes, he thought, had a small round hole with blue edges in the very centre of the forehead, above the nose.
It was her voice, clear and a little loud, that called him back to himself.
“He's not well,” she was saying. “He's going to faint.”
“I'm all right,” he muttered. “It was nothing, nothing, it's only that I've had nothing to eat for so long.”
“Oh, poor man!” exclaimed Ella.