Carfax was about to swing himself behind the wheel to drive the car over to its shed and he paused with a foot on the running-board.
“When it comes to wrestling with the fateful tangles, you haven’t so much the best of me as you may think you have—thanks to your little gift of letter-writing,” he remarked darkly.
Tregarvon walked across to the office-building while Carfax was housing the car, went to his room, and was visible no more until Uncle William called him to dinner. At table he ate like an ogre—a sure sign of disturbment—and refused to rise to any of the small conversational baits flung out by Carfax. But afterward, over the tobacco-jar, there were things to be said and he said them.
“Poictiers, I believe I’ll write my will to-night and let you witness it,” he began. “The easiest thing for me to do now is to go and offer myself to the chief of the bureau of tests as a candidate for the poison squad.”
“Meaning that Elizabeth is here to answer your letter in person?” queried Carfax. “There is nothing so very deadly about that, is there?”
“That remark shows how little you know women. I was perfectly frank with Elizabeth, as I told you, but of course I didn’t write as I should have written if I had known that she and Richardia were bosom friends. Now they will proceed to exchange confidences and compare notes—if they haven’t already done both in their letters to each other. And what the comparison will leave of me won’t be fit to fling to a starved puppy.”
Carfax smoked in silence for quite some time before he said: “How they may stick pins into you, to your face or behind your back, seems a very inconsiderable factor in the case to me, Vance. The deadly part of it is that you are still in love—or you think you are—with Richardia Birrell, while you are going to marry Elizabeth Wardwell.”
“No,” Tregarvon objected, staring gloomily into the fire; “that isn’t the worst of it. There is a still deeper depth: I can’t help being the one or doing the other.”
Carfax began to show signs of becoming restive.
“If Elizabeth only didn’t care so much for you....” Then he took a new tack. “You didn’t tell her all you ought to have told her in that letter, Vance; if you had, you wouldn’t be dreading the actual show-down as you are now. Which means that you still have it to do.”