“A good deal of that time,” she said, “I was simply waiting, waiting. For when I had told him everything, he went out of the room, and was away nearly an hour. And when he came back he seemed to have forgotten everything, for he made me go all over it again. Every word. It was heartbreaking. And after all he could give me no hope, no help, no encouragement. He simply got up, wished me good-bye, and said he would write to you.”
But Gerard saw that this was much better than it seemed to the unsophisticated woman.
“It’s all right,” said he. “Masson never wastes time. If he made you repeat it all it was with an object. Perhaps to see whether you would tell the same story twice.”
“But why should he think I wasn’t telling the truth? Why——”
“Listen,” said Gerard quietly. “It’s all right. He would never have kept you so long if he hadn’t considered your statement important. Wait patiently now till you get his letter.”
“And you, what has happened to you?” asked Audrey curiously. “Something, I’m sure. You both—” and she looked from him to Geoffrey—“have a curious look, as if—as if——”
“Does he look,” said Geoffrey in a deep-voiced whisper, leaning across to Audrey, and pointing dramatically at Gerard, “as if he’d been within an ace of being murdered?” She uttered a low cry. He went on: “And do I look”—and Geoffrey thumped his own chest with an air of triumph—“as if I’d saved his life?”
“What?” said Edgar, who had returned in a depressed and nervous condition, fully convinced that his cousin and Audrey were in league with each other for the concoction of a monstrous string of fables.
Geoffrey insisted upon telling his tale himself, which he did in the same loud whisper, illustrating his points with expressive gestures:—
“Gerard heard Candover’s voice, and went out to speak to him,” said he. “And I, thinking it as well he should have a witness, got into the cupboard here, and took the poker with me.”