“I prefer to see her myself.”
“You haven’t written?”
“No. I am going home when I leave here.”
“But Mrs Hallam has left Cape Town. She gave up the house and went round to Port Elizabeth and took a house there. Since then she—she has given up that house also, I believe. In fact I know she has. We manage her affairs for her.”
Hallam nodded.
“I see nothing very extraordinary in these changes,” he said. “It was not to be expected that she should remain in Cape Town alone. She has relations at the Bay.”
Mr Huntley was silent. He took up from the desk before him, and put down again, a little sheaf of papers, and fidgeted with a pen lying beside the blotting-pad. He looked as he felt, immensely embarrassed.
“My dear Hallam,” he burst forth at length, “I don’t wish to appear to criticise your actions, but your absence—your complete disappearance, in fact, seems to me inexplicable. That is how it would strike any unbiassed person. Whatever your private reasons were for leaving your home, you might at least have kept us informed as to your whereabouts. It would have prevented a great deal of subsequent distress.”
Hallam looked at the speaker in surprise. The last thing he had anticipated was this tone of rebuke from his old friend. That Huntley should suppose he had deliberately suppressed all information relating to himself struck him as an unjust view to take; he resented it.
“I have been a prisoner in Germany since the beginning of the war,” he said quietly. “I wrote home many letters in the early days of my captivity. I wrote to you. Oh! there’s no need to tell me you never received it. I got no replies to anything I sent out; so I left off writing after a time. My case was not exceptional.”