"You don't mind being left alone this evening?"
"No, sir. I hardly expect that anything will happen this evening.
Besides, it is evidently known now that you are at home. Also, which
I omitted to mention before, there is the bell wire to Dr.
Handyside's study."
"Then that's all right," Alan said, not without relief, "and you'll have that big dog by to-morrow or next day."
Caw bowed and went out.
"You didn't answer his question about the clock," remarked Teddy.
"Confound the clock!" Alan laughed and got up. "For a moment I had a mad idea that—well, never mind for the present. We don't want to be late next door."
CHAPTER XIX
Bullard was still in Glasgow. The return of Alan Craig—for he had soon come to laugh at Marvel's story—had been a staggering blow. The will, by which he had reckoned to win, should all other means fail, was become a sheet of waste paper. Moreover, the "other means" were almost certainly rendered impracticable by the presence of Alan at Grey House. Those, however, were only his first thoughts.
The car bearing him and the shivering Flitch from the scene of their success and consternation was not ten miles on its way when his nerves and mind began to regain their normal steadiness and order. Another five miles, and the germ of a fresh plot began to swell in his brain—perhaps the ugliest, grimmest plot yet conceived and developed in that defiled temple. It was a crude plot, too, and quite unworthy of Francis Bullard, as he would have realised for himself had he not been obsessed by the new conviction that the real diamonds, now virtually Alan's, were hidden in the clock in that upper room. Further, it contained a serious flaw, in that it allowed nothing for the possibility of Alan's making a fresh will. And finally, if one may be permitted to put the primary objection last, it depended on the possession of the Green Box which had just passed from his keeping.
Nevertheless, commonsense like conscience failed to condemn the scheme, and Bullard drove into Glasgow with his mind made up.