Barnes interrupted him.
“Don’t tell me any more,” he commanded.
“I’ve been waiting for this chance to talk it over with you, Joe.”
“I haven’t any right to listen,” Barnes hurried on. “But I have something to say to you—that—that may help you out. Only I don’t know just how to begin. I want you to understand, in the first place, that we’ve all been as square as we knew how—that what has happened has been, in a way, inevitable.”
Langdon sat as fixed as a marble statue. Barnes turned his eyes back to the saffron road.
“You see,” he began, “it all came about by chance. I was walking along this road when I found her by the letter-box, crying.”
“Found who?” demanded Langdon.
“Eleanor. She had just received a letter from her brother, saying he wouldn’t come home.”
Langdon looked dazed.
“From her brother?”