“What more do you want?” she asked. “Could a chap like that have had anything more beastly happen to him? Besides, it’s indicated in the form you say his madness takes. He’s always asking who it was who rung us up. Doesn’t it prove that that’s what hit his brain? No, he wasn’t thrown out of a cab. He didn’t stumble. My husband didn’t turn up, no. Nothing of the sort. He was just knocked plumb-centre by that chap saying: ‘Isn’t that Dudley Leicester speaking?’”
Robert Grimshaw’s face was the hue of wood-ash.
“My dear Etta,” he said with his gentle collectiveness. “It’s perfectly obvious that you aren’t responsible for Dudley’s collapse. It was the meddling fool at the other end of the telephone.”
“It was rather meddlesome when you come to think of it, but then perhaps he didn’t know there was anything wrong in Dudley’s being where he was.”
“Perhaps he didn’t,” Robert Grimshaw said. “Let’s go and have lunch.”
“Oh, I don’t want any lunch,” she said. “Take me home.”
She supported herself on his arm as they walked up the long avenue, for her footsteps were not very steady.
PART IV
I
“OH no,” the specialist said, “I don’t see what purpose it would serve, your telling his wife exactly what happened. I prefer, indeed, that you should not. No doubt it was the shock of hearing the voice on the telephone that actually induced the state of mind. But to know the fact doesn’t help us—it doesn’t help us towards the cure. All we can do is to wait. His chance is that he’s not such a very young man. If it had happened ten years ago there wouldn’t have been any chance for him at all; but the brain-fibre—what the Germans call the Hirnstoff—is tougher now. Anyhow, we can’t say.”