“Where else could he be?”
“Outside. He could see us going over the island from one of those upper windows. After we’d finished he could have slipped out again, knowing he was safe there.”
She saw the possibilities of this and hung on them, left the door and conning them over, paced about the room. Presently they could bear the shut-in space no longer and crept through the hall to the living-room. They stood on the threshold, subduing their breathing that no sound might interfere with their entranced attention. The silence of the house lay round them like an enshrouding essence. Far away the rhythm of the waves came and went, faint and regular, like the pulsing of the world’s heart tranquilly beating in some infinitely remote realm of peace.
They returned to the library and, as the minutes passed and the strain increased, stood motionless and dumb as statues, waiting, listening. They felt as if everything but that room and their suspense had ceased to exist, as if time had stopped and this one fearful hour was to stretch out forever.
Then a sound from the distant reaches of the house broke it—the descending feet of the men. Bassett pulled her away from the door, closed it and drew her to the middle of the room.
“Will you help me?” she whispered. “Will you help me whatever happens?”
He nodded, there was no time now for words. He motioned her to sit down, and moved back from her, listening to the steps which were crossing the living-room, entering the hall. Were they louder than they had been going up, were there three pair of feet where there had been two? They stopped at the door, it opened and Rawson and Williams entered.
Williams threw an electric torch on the desk and said to Bassett with a sardonic grin:
“Nothing doing.”
Rawson spoke to Anne: