"That was why I wanted so to go and see her off. To try to make up a little; to do everything we could do just because I felt there'd never be any other chance." The tears came at last. "She was nice, wasn't she, Mr. Gavan?"
"She was wonderful." And before they fell back into that silence that lasted till they reached Lamborough, he asked, "How long have you known, Meggy?"
"Been sure only since yesterday—those men, what they did to her room."
There was good stuff in the McIntyre child, he said to himself. The part she'd played wouldn't have shamed Napier or even a Nicholson Grant.
There was nobody about to receive them on their return. When Madge had gone up to her mother, Napier took his way down the hall to Sir William's room. But he caught sight of him through the open door of the drawing-room at the far end. Sir William sat reading. That was natural enough, and he was sitting in his own chair. But as far away as Napier could see his chief, he was vaguely aware of something odd about the figure that was, or should be, so intimately familiar. It wasn't merely that Sir William did not instantly rise to his feet, seal-jingling, and call out, "Evening paper? Anything new about—" The first impression was of a man smaller than Napier had realized Sir William to be. Or had he—Napier half smiled at the grotesque idea—had he shrunken in these last hours? The great chair Miss Greta had fetched for him from Kirklamont certainly did seem ludicrously too big for a being so diminished, not only in body, but in spirit. His quick turns and vivid ways—what, Napier wondered with a dreamlike feeling as he walked down the room, had happened to all the familiar, foolish, endearing oddities? For an instant the thought thrust shrewdly, Is he dead? No, he moved.
"Well, sir, we have done your commission."
Like the action of a wooden automaton, one short-fingered hand was pushed out toward the reading-desk. It seemed to point to the small phial that lay on the ledge of the rack; the phial he had carried in his pocket for months now as precaution in the event of an attack of angina. But Sir William's eyes were not on the phial. They were fixed on an open telegram.
And it was that telegram Sir William had sat reading. For how long?
The telegram regretted to inform him that his son, Captain Colin McIntyre, while bravely leading his battalion, had been killed in action.