We murmured assent.
"Now for our deductions. Morse, divil take him! has some deadly important reason for this fantastic, spectacular show of his. The public see it as the fancy of a chap who's so much money he don't know what to do with it, a fellow that's exhausted all sensation and is now trying for a new one. Let 'em think so! But we know—here in this room—a long sight more than the general public knows. Tom and that young fly-by-night, with the red hair and the stained-glass-window ears, he's been cartin' about with him, have got behind the scenes."
Pat's face hardened.
"We alone are certain that the man Morse, for all his equanimity and the mask he has presented to London during the season, has been living under the influence of some dirty, cowardly fear or other!"
Arthur interrupted.
"Fear, if you like, Pat, but I don't think it is probably dirty, or even cowardly. You forget Miss Morse."
"Perhaps you're right. At any rate, if Gideon Morse is really menaced by some great danger, what cleverer trick could he have played? To let the world suppose that it's his whim and fancy to live like a rook at the top of an elm tree, when all the time he's providing against the possibility of annihilation, that's a stroke of genius."
"Good for you, Pat," said Arthur with a wink to me, "you're on the track of it."
"Indeed, and I think I am," said the big guardsman simply, "and here's the cunning of it, the supreme sense of self-preservation. If that man Morse is in fear of his life, and in fear for his daughter's too, he couldn't have invented a more perfect security than he has done. From all we know, from all Tom has told us, no one can get at them now but an archangel!"
Then Arthur spoke.