"Did she take any things?" I queried huskily.
"A wee bundle—" said Griselda—"night things and the like."
The shuddering dismay of that moment I shall never forget.
"Did she talk with—with him at all during the evening?" The words struggled out of my parched throat in spite of me, and I should have hated to see my own eyes.
"Ay," said Griselda, "that he did, the leper! All the evening he was wheedling her to come to him with the bairns when he set up his house. She was weeping sair to me in the kitchen afterward. It was to ask you if you wanted her to go that she waited for you in the study—and fell asleep, the poor maidie!"
"And what did you say to her?" I all but whispered into the mouthpiece.
"I told the lass not to greet," shouted Griselda. "I told her I could nae believe it would happen. He would never take the bairns. And if he did he would nae keep them. He was a bad one—the evil brute! But she was frightened, the puir lassie!"
"Very well, Griselda," I muttered stonily. "I must think. I shall call you a little later. Don't alarm the others."
She hated him, had said Griselda! There was a meager ray of comfort. But do what I would, my stunned mind continued to flutter heavily like a half-scorched moth around the ugly, sinister vision of Pendleton. Could he be at the bottom of Alicia's disappearance? How had he contrived the trick? If only I had gone to the station with him! Was it that that accounted for his hurry to be gone? No! It was impossible. Ought I to start in pursuit at once? No, no, no! I could not believe it. It could not be—not of her own free will! Yet my heart was lacerated by the possibility. When I lifted my head from my bosom, I gasped in a desolation of emptiness.
I had stifled the prompting to call Dibdin last night, but now I felt I must find him. I needed the solace and advice of a friend. I rose heavily and put on my hat. Visconti had not yet come in.