“In bed, sir; he has unfortunately been taken worse. Will you take a seat, sir; the other gentlemen will be here directly.”
“Other? Why, who is coming?”
“Lord Warrington, for one, sir; and, if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear his lordship arriving.”
Lord Warrington it was who entered next, and the two greeted each other with mutual amazement.
“What’s up now, Warrington? I hear Sir Robert’s ill.”
“So I hear; but he rang me up, or, rather, that invaluable factotum of his did so, and said Sir Robert begged me to come here at nine to-night on a most urgent matter, so I came of course.”
“Same here—precisely the same message. Looks as if it were to be a sort of board meeting. Is it about Carling? Poor chap! Personally, I wish it had been possible to save him, but that’s impossible, in the face of the evidence, and that verdict.”
“I suppose so,” Lord Warrington assented gravely. “It’s an awful tragedy—a brilliant youngster like that! And you know, Lorimer, if ever homicide was justifiable, that was—from our point of view. He ought to have been rewarded rather than punished! For if she”—he frowned up at the portrait—“had passed on those papers—whew!—Rawson himself never actually saw them, doesn’t know their contents to this day. If he did he’d think as I do, even though his own wife was the victim—as she was the thief, confound her! I say, this room’s pretty weird, what? Damn those flowers, they smell like death!”
“Here’s Cummings-Browne. So it is about Carling,” said Lorimer, and stalked towards the new-comer, his old friend since the days when they were both briefless barristers sharing chambers in the Temple. “Look here, old man, if you arranged this conference, or whatever it is, in the hope of getting a reprieve for Carling, you must know as well as I do that it’s absolutely useless.”