Womanlike she ascribed it to illness. He had been over-working. He was a man of such impulsive energy, so full of ideas, so impatient of delays. He seemed always to want to do everything at the moment he thought of it. Incidentally he expected others to be imbued with his own vitality. He had worn himself out, she decided, or was it that he was being drugged? Time after time the idea had suggested itself to her, only to be dismissed as melodramatic.
Sometimes there would cross her mind a suspicion so strange, so fantastic that she would brush it aside as utterly ridiculous.
Luncheon arrived and no John Dene. Dorothy made an indifferent meal. One o'clock passed, two o'clock came. She had visions of him lying in his room at the hotel too ill to summon assistance. She determined upon action and rang up the Ritzton. To her enquiry as to whether or no Mr. John Dene were in came the reply that he was not. Would they find out at what time he left the hotel? It was his secretary speaking. Yes, they would if Dorothy would hold on.
At the end of what seemed an age came the reply: Mr. John Dene had left the hotel on the previous morning and had not since returned.
With a clatter the receiver fell from Dorothy's hand. It was something worse than illness then that had kept John Dene from his office! This she saw clearly. Probably he was lying dead in some out of the way spot, a victim of the hidden hand. She felt physically sick at the thought. He was such a splendid man, she told herself. Ready to give everything for nothing. The sort of man that made for victory.
Suddenly she remembered the episode of the taxi on the previous evening and became galvanised to action. What a fool she had been. Seizing the receiver of the private line to the Admiralty, she demanded to be put through to Mr. Blair. Presently she heard his mellow, patient voice. No, he had heard nothing of John Dene, nor had he seen him for several days. There was a note of plaintive gratitude in Mr. Blair's voice; but Dorothy was too worried to notice it.
Putting up the receiver, she snatched up her hat, jabbed the pins through it, one of them into her head, and almost throwing herself into her coat, dashed down the stairs and literally ran across Waterloo Place, down the Duke of York's steps into the Admiralty. She passed swiftly in and up to Mr. Blair's room, into which she burst with a lack of ceremony that convinced him she had already imbibed the qualities that made John Dene the terror of his existence.
"I want to see Sir Lyster at once," she panted.
Mr. Blair looked up at her in surprise.
"He's engaged just now, Miss West," he said mildly. "Is there anything I can do?"