“Gone off on some business of his own. You were telling the truth when you told Rawson and Williams that Joe’s actions weren’t always calculable, weren’t you?” He saw her answering nod. “Well, he’s evidently chosen the occasion of his leaving the island to light out in some new direction. You can’t tell what may have been in his head—a joke on Jimmy Travers, on us, any sort of lark or tom-foolery. We’ll find it all out soon.”
He had his own opinion of Joe’s behavior which he was not going to tell her now. The boy, found out in his spying, knowing himself condemned by his associates and black-listed in his profession, might have departed for good, taken the opportunity to disappear from a part of the country where closed doors and averted faces would be his portion. It would be like him and Bassett fervently hoped that it might be the case.
“Come,” he said, rising and drawing her to her feet. “There’s no good bothering about that any more. Leave it to me and when we’ve got through the rest of this horrible business I’ll look around for him. And anyway, he’ll see it in the papers, and if he wants to show up, he’ll do it himself within the next few days. Now you must go to bed and let your poor tired brain rest.”
They walked to the door and there he caught her against his breast and looked into her face:
“It’s all over—that fighting and struggling alone, Anne. After this we’ll be together, as soon as we can get away from here and find a clergyman to marry us.”
They kissed and parted, Bassett going to his room—he could sleep now—and Anne faring slowly up the stairs to hers.
XVIII
Any one watching Gull Island from the shore would have seen the yellow shape of one bright window set like a small golden square in the darkness. The bright window was Anne’s and over against it Anne sat on the side of the bed looking at the floor. She sat perfectly still, held in a staring concentration of thought, reviewing the happenings of the night. The inability to understand that she had expressed to Bassett had come back to her, there were things that she could not explain away. Like a child piecing together the disconnected bits of a puzzle, she contemplated separate facts, studied them, dropped each one in turn and went on to another.
While Bassett had talked to her she had accepted his theory. His belief in it had been so absolute and it was so plausible. Of course a person in her state might have imagined anything. And as she dwelt on the sentence to persuade herself, the vision of the dim shadowy room rose before her with the figure coming toward her from the darkness of the gallery, moving spiritlike as an hallucination might move. But as the memory grew in vividness the shape took form and solidity, the slim boy’s shape. She saw again its rapid advance, its sudden stoppage at her words, its lightning-quick turn and soundless flight. The snap of the closing door came to her mind as a last confirmation and she knew it was no delusion.
“I did,” she said in a whisper, and raised her eyes as if confronting a doubter with the truth. “I know it—I did see somebody.”