“And now,” said the doctor, “it turns out that Mr. Dick has a wife, or perhaps two, of an unusually affectionate kind. And you have a wife and an aunt who have some regard for you. That makes five women altogether, all of them more or less energetic, and all of them bent on finding us. The question is, how long will it be before they think of coming to Rosivera?”
“Not long,” said Mr. Sanders, “not long, I hope.”
“For the sake of my poor wife,” said Mr. Dick, who had covered himself with the bed-clothes again, “I trust it will not be long.”
“Be damn,” said Patsy Devlin, “but to listen to the way you’re talking, a man would think nobody in the world but yourself ever had a wife. I have one myself, as the doctor was saying this minute, and I wouldn’t wonder but she might be a better one than yours. But you don’t hear me lamenting over her every time I open my mouth.”
“Tell me this,” said the doctor: “did you ever escape from your wife before?”
“Escape from her!”
“I mean, did you ever temporarily desert her, either through being taken prisoner or otherwise?”
“Never,” said Mr. Dick. “We’ve only been a year married, and we’ve never been parted, even for a single day.”
“That’s all right,” said the doctor. “Then she won’t have had any practice in looking for you. Patsy Devlin’s wife, as you heard, is likely to go straight to the police barrack when she misses him. But then she’s more or less accustomed to his not turning up regularly.”
“I wouldn’t say,” said Patsy, “that the police would be paying too much attention to what she might tell them.”