“Terribly, my dear sir, terribly. Good morning.”
Glyddyr stood looking after him as the doctor walked away, and a fit of trembling came on.
“He was pumping me, and he is suspicious,” thought Glyddyr. “Curse him! These doctors have a way of reading a man, and seeing through you. But he could only suspect; and what is suspicion where they want certainty?”
“What could he say,” he thought; “and how does it stand? He gave him chloral; Gartram took it himself, and if a little more was given, well, what could they prove unless they saw?”
“No; unless I betray myself, I am safe,” he muttered, as he walked up to the principal entrance and rang; but as the loud clangour of the bell ran through the place, the shiver of dread returned, and he was conscious from his sensations that he must be looking ghastly, and that his lips be white and cracked.
The door was opened by one of the maids.
“Ask Miss Gartram if she can see me for a few minutes,” he said, in a voice he hardly knew as his own.
The maid drew back for him to enter, and showed him into the drawing-room, where the yellow gloom of the light passing through the drawn-down blinds seemed to add to the oppression from which he suffered. Then, as he stood there, his hot eyes fixed themselves upon the chair which had been occupied by Claude when he was there the previous night; and he found himself wondering what he should say to her; and then a singular feeling of confusion came over him as he asked himself why he had come.
A footstep in the hall made him tremble, and he felt as if he could have given anything to be away from the place, for now, in its full force, he felt the terror of the interview he had to go through with the child of the man he had murdered, and who must now be lying still and stark not many yards away, while in the spirit, where was he?—perhaps about to be present to guard his child.
“If I only had more strength of mind!” groaned Glyddyr, as he vainly tried to string himself up. Then the door was opened, and he was face to face with Mary Dillon.