Chester looked at the woman fixedly, but she met his gaze in the calmest way—not a muscle moved, not a nerve quivered.
“Very well,” he said at last, “I see you are determined to ignore the past entirely.”
The housekeeper made a slight deprecatory movement toward him, and then signed the butler to open the door, which he did with alacrity, but Chester stood fast, looking past the housekeeper toward the end of the hall, where there was the opening into the great dining-room, the scene of the strange adventure when he first came to the house.
“Very well,” he said at last, as he mastered a wild desire to rush upstairs and call Marion by name until she replied; and he spoke now in a subdued tone of voice which the butler could not hear, “of course you are in the plot, but I shall not let matters rest here. It would have been better if you had met me as a friend—as I believed you to be—of Miss Marion and Mr Robert, but I see that you are bound up with the others. And mind this: I was disposed to assist in hushing up that trouble, but as I am convinced that Miss Marion is receiving foul play, I shall leave no stone unturned to obtain speech with her, even going so far, if necessary, as to call in the aid of the police.”
There was a calm, grave, pitying look upon the housekeeper’s countenance which literally staggered Chester, and he went out quickly and turned to the right, the butler closing the door with a bang.
“He’s a regular lunatic, ma’am,” said the butler. “Got hold of the names from the Directory or the tradesfolk; but I’m very glad you were there.”
“Poor gentleman,” said the housekeeper, gravely, “there seems to be some strange hallucination in his brain.”