“It’s a reasonable question. I can’t get a tug to take me back until noon to-morrow.”
“Ah!” said Jessie, and added: “You will excuse me for a minute.”
She left him astonished. He had not expected her to take him at a disadvantage, as she had done with her previous thrust, and now he did not think she had slipped away to hide her feelings. That did not seem necessary in Jessie’s case, though he believed she was more or less disturbed. She came back presently, looking calm, and sat down again.
“My brother will be here in a quarter of an hour,” she informed him. “Things are rather slack, and he had half promised to take me for a drive; I have called him up through the telephone.”
Carroll did not see how this bore upon the subject of their conversation, but he left her to take the lead.
“Did Vane tell you I had promised to warn him?” she asked.
“To do him justice, he let it out before he quite realised what he was saying. I’d better own that I partly surprised him into giving me the information.”
“The expedient seems a favourite one with you,” said Jessie. “I suppose no news of what has happened here can have reached him?”
“None. If it’s any consolation, he has still an unshaken confidence in you.” Carroll assured her with blunt bitterness.
The girl showed faint signs of confusion, but she sat silent for the next few moments, and during them it flashed upon her companion with illuminating light that he had heard Celia Hartley say Miss Horsfield had found her orders for millinery. This confirmed his previous suspicion that Jessie had discovered who had paid the rent of Celia’s shack, and that she had with deliberate malice informed Evelyn, distorting her account so that it would tell against Vane. There were breaks in the chain of reasoning which led him to this conclusion, but he did not think Jessie would shrink from such a course, and he determined to try a chance shot.