Ursula would this night consent to marry him, and would be glad, if she refused, to consider her decision. He would be her accepted lover before he left the house, and the thought took his breath away.
“Am I mad?” he asked aloud, as he parked his car in the side turning where Carver had almost found it once.
Madmen did not take such elaborate precautions. Madmen did not remember that by some mischance her servant might telephone for the police, nor carry in their pockets a weighted cord to throw over the telephone wire and bring it down. They did not even buy the cord of such and such a length, so much to bind Tab Holland, so much to break the wire and buy just sufficient for the purpose.
“I am not mad,” said Rex Lander, as he went in through the gate.
The house was in darkness; no lights glowed from the upper window where she was sleeping.
He had made a very careful reconnaissance of the house, and knew its vulnerable points. He opened the casement window of the drawing-room, and had stepped softly inside the room before, in ordinary circumstances, a servant could have answered his ring at the door.
He was in her room! Her sitting-room! It held the very charm of her presence, and he would have been content to sit here, absorbing the atmosphere which she lent to everything she touched, dreaming dreams as he had dreamt so often in the night watches at Doughty Street, at his office, when he should have been working, in the solitary walk home from the theatre, after he had been listening entranced to her wonderful voice.
He took from his pocket a large electric torch and flashed it round. On the little cottage piano was a bowl of roses; reverently he drew one out, nipped off its stalk, and threaded it tenderly in his buttonhole. Her hand had placed it there. She had taken it from the garden, kissed it perhaps—he bent his head, and his lips touched the velvety petals.
The door was not locked. He was in the hall, the wide-flagged hall. In the corner was a grandfather’s clock that ticked sedately.
Her room was in the front of the house: he knew he could not miss it, but must stand on the landing in an ecstasy of anticipation. He put down his torch upon the settee, took off his coat and mechanically smoothed his hair. Then he tip-toed forward. His hand was on the knob of the door when an arm came round his neck, a lithe sinewy arm that strangled the cry which rose in his throat.