“He looks somewhat like you,” I ventured to observe.
“More like mother, I should say,” he replied.
“And where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He was, when I last heard of him, lodging in Kingstown or Blackrock. I don’t know much about him. We were never friends. He always resented mother’s second marriage, and, I fear, hated me in consequence.”
Then Gerald spoke of some other indifferent subject, and I did not desire to bring him back to the one uppermost in my mind. But as he talked the question shaped itself—“Was Frank L—— the assassin, and if so what could have been his motive?”
A few days after I left Creeve House as Gerald was nearly himself again. I found, however that the strain of attending him, and the anxiety, and the vision, and the haunting question ever putting itself to me, had taxed me more than I had thought, and I determined to spend a few days at the sea-side, and I found a couple of rooms that suited me in one of the houses on the Bray Esplanade not far from the “Head.”
I took the rooms, put in my luggage, and went to Dublin for a few hours to transact some private business. It was near ten at night when I returned. I found my landlady very much perturbed. The gentleman who had occupied the rooms I had taken had, as she thought, gone away finally, but two or three days of his tenancy were unexpired, and he returned unexpectedly that evening. If I did not mind, she said, I could have for the night the room of another gentleman who was and would be absent for three or four days.
Of course I assented, and in a few minutes I was told the room was ready.
Being rather tired I went up to it on receiving this information. I glanced around it, and was satisfied. I sat on a chair facing the chimney-piece, in order to take off my boots; and this done, I gazed about more leisurely, and observed that over the mantle-place, in a rack, was suspended a gun. I went over towards it to examine it, as I am curious in firearms, and discovered with a sharp surprise that the lock of the gun was broken.