Captain Grey was enchanted with the idea of Lexy’s spending a week with his sister. He was going, too. Indeed, Lexy felt sure that Mrs. Quelton had wanted him to go there some time ago, and that he had refused simply on her own account. He didn’t like to leave her alone at Mrs. Royce’s, and after her nervous breakdown that afternoon nothing could have induced him to do so. He was anxious about her. He tried, with what he believed was great tact, to find out her plans for the future. He was genuinely troubled by the loneliness and uncertainty of her life.
Lexy appreciated all this, and she liked the young man very much—perhaps as much as he liked her; but the sympathetic understanding which had promised to develop on the night when they talked together in the firelight had never developed. Something had checked it. They were the best of friends, but Captain Grey never again referred to what Lexy had told him about Caroline Enderby, and about her reason for coming to Wyngate; and Lexy said nothing, either. Evidently he thought that it had been a far-fetched, romantic notion of hers, and hoped that she had forgotten all about it.
Lexy did not try to undeceive him. Her story would be too fantastic for him to believe. Nobody would believe it, except a person with absolute faith not only in her honesty but in her intelligence and clear-sightedness; and there was no such person. She was not resentful or grieved over this. She accepted it quietly, and prepared to go forward alone.
It had occurred to her lately that perhaps Mr. Houseman had been right, and that Caroline had gone away of her own free will; but she meant to know. She had seen the missing girl in Dr. Quelton’s house. Whatever the doctor might say about the false evidence of the senses, Lexy’s confidence in her own clear gray eyes was not in the least shaken. She had seen Caroline once, and she was going to see her again. That was why she was going to the Tower.
“It’ll do Muriel no end of good,” said Captain Grey, when they were in the taxi. “She’s—to tell you the truth, Miss Moran, I don’t feel altogether easy about her.”
“Why?” asked Lexy, very curious to know what he thought.
“Well,” he said, “it’s hard to put it into words; but that’s not a wholesome sort of life for a young woman, shut away like that. The doctor says her health’s not good, but it’s my opinion that if she got about more—saw more people, you know—”
Lexy felt a great pity for him. Apparently he did not even suspect what she was now sure of—that the unfortunate Muriel was hopelessly addicted to some drug, which her husband himself gave to her.
“And I hope he’ll go back to India before he does find out,” she thought. “It’s too horrible—he worships her so!”
“I’ve tried, you know,” he went on. “I wanted to take her into the city, to a concert. Seems confoundedly queer, doesn’t it, the way she’s lost interest in her music? She didn’t want to go. Then about the emerald—”