“You poor, dear thing!” thought Lexy, with ready sympathy, but she did not say anything.
“Anyhow,” he presently continued, “I got an impression from her letters that she was rather an extraordinary girl. She was studying music—said she was going on the concert stage—awfully enthusiastic about it; and then she married this doctor chap. She never said much about him, only that she was very happy; but—well, I don’t believe that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Anyhow, she was married about two years ago, and a few months after her marriage she began writing oftener—almost every mail. She was always wanting me to come over here and see her; and lately, in her last letters, I—somehow I fancied she wanted me rather badly. It—it worried me, so I arranged for leave. On the very day when I wrote that I would be coming over this month, I had a letter from her, asking me not to make any plans for coming this year. She said she’d taken up her concert work again, and would be too busy to enjoy the visit, and so on. I’d already made my plans, you see, so I went ahead. Then, about a fortnight later, after she’d got my letter, I suppose, I had a cable. ‘Don’t come,’ it said. I cabled back, but she didn’t answer.”
He looked anxiously at Lexy, but she said nothing. She sat very still, curled up in a big chair, staring into the fire with an odd look of uncertainty on her face.
“You know,” he went on, “I’ve tried to think that she was simply too busy, or something of that sort. But, Miss Moran, didn’t this woman’s manner rather make you think there was something a bit—out of the way?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Lexy, in a casual tone which very much disconcerted him.
“I’ve been making a fool of myself!” he thought, flushing. “Why the devil didn’t I keep my old-woman notions to myself? Now she’ll think—”
But Lexy was not thinking that Captain Grey was a fool. She was only very much afraid of being one herself, and was engaged in a severe struggle against this danger. That dread, that vague and oppressive dread, had come back, and she was fighting to throw it off. She wanted to be, she would be, her own normal, cheerful self again, living in a normal, everyday world.
“All this about his sister, and about Caroline!” she thought. “It’s really nothing—nothing serious. Our both being here in Wyngate—that’s nothing, either. It’s just a coincidence. If the gas wasn’t turned down, I wouldn’t feel like this.”