I was on the point of accepting the hint when Frank Jervaise dragged me into the conclave.
“What do you think, Melhuish?” he asked, and then they all turned to me as if I might be able in some miraculous way to save the situation. Even old Jervaise paused in his melancholy pacing and waited for my answer.
“There is so little real evidence, at present,” I said, feeling their need for some loophole and searching my mind to discover one for them.
“It really does seem almost impossible that Brenda should have—run away with that man,” Mrs. Jervaise pleaded with the beginning of a gesture that produced the effect of wanting to wring her hands.
“She’s under age, too,” Frank put in.
“Does that mean they can’t get married?” asked Ronnie.
“Not legally,” Frank said.
“It’s such madness, such utter madness,” his mother broke out in a tone between lament and denunciation. But she pulled herself up immediately and came back to my recent contribution as presenting the one possible straw that still floated in this drowning world. “But, as Mr. Melhuish says,” she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, “we really have very little evidence, as yet.”
“It has occurred to me to wonder,” I tried, “whether Miss Jervaise might not have been moved by a sudden desire to drive the car by moonlight…” I was going on to defend my suggestion by pleading that such an impulse would, so far as I could judge, be quite in character, but no further argument was needed. I had created a sensation. My feeble straw had suddenly taken the form of a practicable seaworthy raft, big enough to accommodate all the family—with the one exception of Frank, who, as it were, grasped the edge of this life-saving apparatus of mine, and tested it suspiciously. His preliminary and perfectly futile opening to the effect that the moon had already set, was, however, smothered in the general acclamation.
“Oh! of course! So she may!” Mrs. Jervaise exclaimed.