She closed the door from the outside, and Barnes was alone with the cousin of kings and queens and princes.
"I feared you had deserted me," she said, holding out her hand to him as he strode across the room. S he did not rise from the chair in which she was seated by the window. The lower wings of the old-fashioned shutters were closed except for a narrow strip; light streamed down upon her wavy golden hair from the upper half of the casement. She was attired in a gorgeously flowered dressing-gown; he had seen it once before, draping the matutinal figure of Miss Thackeray as she glided through the hall with a breakfast tray which Miss Tilly had flatly refused to carry to her room: being no servant, she declared with heat.
"I saw no occasion to disturb your rest," he mumbled. "Nothing—nothing new has turned up."
"I have been peeping," she said, looking at him searchingly. A little line of anxiety lay between her eyes. "Where is Mr. Loeb going, Mr. Barnes?"
He noted the omission of Mr. O'Dowd. "To Hornville, I believe. They stopped for gasoline."
"Is he running away?" was her disconcerting question.
"O'Dowd says he is to be gone for a few days on business," he equivocated.
"He will not return," she said quietly. "He is a coward at heart. Oh, I know him well," she went on, scorn in her voice.
"Was I wrong in not trying to stop him?" he asked.
She pondered this for a moment. "No," she said, but he caught the dubious note in her voice. "It is just as well, perhaps, that he should disappear. Nothing is to be gained now by his seizure. Next week, yes; but to-day, no. His flight to-day spares—but we are more interested in the man Sprouse. Has he returned?"