Everything depended upon his getting there in time.
All the way he tortured himself with pictures of Nan in some fearful trouble. By whom else at Lamborough could he, Gavan Napier, be "cruelly needed"?
He remembered Julian's speech about her that day of her arrival. "Did you ever see such faith in any pair of eyes? It's pathetic, a person like that. Think of the knocks she'll get."
He cursed the slowness of the car that was going fifty miles an hour.
"Nan! Nan! I'm coming!"
For the hundredth time he lived over those minutes among the rocks; that lightning stroke in the blood; the astonishment of the two victims; the shame; the silent, shared, effort at retrieval. Hardly two sentences had been exchanged between them afterward. Yet there had been no conscious abstention from the luxury of speech. A bewilderment possessed them, an aching too anguished not to be dumb.
He had gone away early the next morning without seeing her again. He had not written.
There was no sign of Nan or of any one else, as Napier drove up to the house toward four o'clock that afternoon. The quickening of his pulses on the way to the drawing-room seemed to say, "She is here." But the room was empty. All the house was strangely still, in that brief interval before word came down. Would Mr. Napier come up to Lady McIntyre's sitting room?
"Oh, Mr. Gavan!" As though she were the last survivor of some huge disaster, a woeful, haggard little lady came forward to greet him. "I thought you'd never get here. It has been the most dreadful time." She dropped among her sofa cushions, speechless for a moment. "Even up there in Scotland," tacitly she reproached him, "you've heard, I suppose, of the length this spy mania has gone. Everybody with a foreign name is suspected. Any one who protests, even the most trusted official—openly insulted—"