“No business of ours?” cried Bayre. “If he keeps a woman shut up against her will!”
“Ah, but it can’t be against her will,” said Olwen, “for there’s no doubt she could make herself heard if she chose. Remember, this place is a regular haunt of tourists in the summer; they come over by dozens to see Mr Bayre’s collection. Now how is it possible, considering that you can get round the house without difficulty, that a woman could be shut up against her will in it, with only a feeble old man as jailer? You can see that it’s impossible.”
“But she may have only been there a few months, or weeks, since the tourist season?” suggested Bayre, half-heartedly.
For indeed Olwen’s objection seemed to be a reasonable one.
“But I’ve been here all that time,” rejoined she. “And though I have the same feeling as you, that there is someone shut up there, I can’t understand how she can be kept there against her will. It’s true I don’t go all over the house; but I do go all round it. And if this absurd thing were possible, that a live woman were imprisoned there, I can’t believe that she wouldn’t have made me some sign during all this time.”
This did indeed seem conclusive, though it left the matter more mysterious than ever.
“It’s only during the last few weeks that you’ve had this idea of a woman shut up there?” said he.
“Yes. Since your first visit. I remember talking to you one day about romance, and your teasing me a little about my ambition to write novels. Well, now that I’ve come in contact with romance, I don’t like it at all; and I’d willingly exchange this uneasy feeling I always have that something’s going to happen—something mysterious, awful—for a nice, tame, flat, commonplace existence such as they describe in books by the word ‘suburban.’ ”
Bayre laughed.
“No,” said he. “Believe me, you’d better suffer the ills you know, the imaginary lady who, after all, doesn’t interfere with you, and the rather lonely existence you lead here, than fly to the cold mutton, the cheap piano and the villa one brick thick, which are some of the suburban ills you dream not of.”