“Very likely, but I might say the same of your apprehensions. Oh, no! don’t eat me! I haven’t said it, and I swear I don’t think it!”
She cast him a fulminating look. “Perhaps, sir, you believe me to be suffering from the merest irritation of the nerves?”
“Not a bit of it! I believe you to be a woman of admirable common sense, and I place the utmost reliance on what you tell me. If you were the most vapourish female imaginable, I must still lend an attentive ear to your story: do not let us forget that a gatekeeper, stationed almost at your door, has disappeared under circumstances which one can only call mysterious! That is quite as fantastic as anything you have told me, you know!”
Slightly mollified, she said: “It seems absurd, but do you suppose Brean’s disappearance may be connected in some way with whatever it is those two are plotting?”
“Certainly I do—though in what way I must own I have not the smallest conjecture! However, it will not do to be applying the principles of common sense to a situation which we clearly perceive to be something quite out of the ordinary, so do not tell me, ma’am, that it is fantastic to suppose that your cousin and his friend can have anything to do with a gatekeeper!”
She smiled, but absently, saying, after a moment: “I thought I was indulging my fancy only, but—the thing is, Captain Staple, that I am persuaded my cousin is suspicious of you! I don’t know who told him that there was a new gatekeeper at the Crowford pike, but he knows it, and has been asking me who you are, and what has become of Brean.”
“Well, that does not encourage us to think that Brean is working with him,” John admitted. “On the other hand, he might be cutting a sham—making it appear, you see, as though he knew nothing of Brean. Or even being afraid of what Brean may be doing.”
“No, I don’t think it is that,” she replied, knitting her brows. “Coate seems not to care about it. He came into the room when Henry was questioning me, and all he said was that he had fancied you were not the man who had opened to him before, but for his part he had paid very little heed to you.”
“Well, before he is much older he will be paying a great deal of heed to me,” observed John. “However, you were very right not to tell him so! He is too set in his ways, and a surprise will be good for him. For anything we know, of course, he and Brean may have decided to tip Cousin Henry the double. Or—But the possibilities stretch into infinity!”
“Are you funning again?” she demanded. “I collect that you think it all incredible!”