“You must have had a charming evening,” I said to Fyne, “if I may judge from the way you have kept the memory green.”
“Delightful,” he growled with, positively, a flash of anger at the recollection, but lapsed back into his solemnity at once. After we had been silent for a while I asked whether the man took away the girl next day.
Fyne said that he did; in the afternoon, in a fly, with a few clothes the maid had got together and brought across from the big house. He only saw Flora again ten minutes before they left for the railway station, in the Fynes’ sitting-room at the hotel. It was a most painful ten minutes for the Fynes. The respectable citizen addressed Miss de Barral as “Florrie” and “my dear,” remarking to her that she was not very big “there’s not much of you my dear” in a familiarly disparaging tone. Then turning to Mrs. Fyne, and quite loud “She’s very white in the face. Why’s that?” To this Mrs. Fyne made no reply. She had put the girl’s hair up that morning with her own hands. It changed her very much, observed Fyne. He, naturally, played a subordinate, merely approving part. All he could do for Miss de Barral personally was to go downstairs and put her into the fly himself, while Miss de Barral’s nearest relation, having been shouldered out of the way, stood by, with an umbrella and a little black bag, watching this proceeding with grim amusement, as it seemed. It was difficult to guess what the girl thought or what she felt. She no longer looked a child. She whispered to Fyne a faint “Thank you,” from the fly, and he said to her in very distinct tones and while still holding her hand: “Pray don’t forget to write fully to my wife in a day or two, Miss de Barral.” Then Fyne stepped back and the cousin climbed into the fly muttering quite audibly: “I don’t think you’ll be troubled much with her in the future;” without however looking at Fyne on whom he did not even bestow a nod. The fly drove away.
CHAPTER FIVE—THE TEA-PARTY
“Amiable personality,” I observed seeing Fyne on the point of falling into a brown study. But I could not help adding with meaning: “He hadn’t the gift of prophecy though.”
Fyne got up suddenly with a muttered “No, evidently not.” He was gloomy, hesitating. I supposed that he would not wish to play chess that afternoon. This would dispense me from leaving my rooms on a day much too fine to be wasted in walking exercise. And I was disappointed when picking up his cap he intimated to me his hope of seeing me at the cottage about four o’clock—as usual.
“It wouldn’t be as usual.” I put a particular stress on that remark. He admitted, after a short reflection, that it would not be. No. Not as usual. In fact it was his wife who hoped, rather, for my presence. She had formed a very favourable opinion of my practical sagacity.
This was the first I ever heard of it. I had never suspected that Mrs. Fyne had taken the trouble to distinguish in me the signs of sagacity or folly. The few words we had exchanged last night in the excitement—or the bother—of the girl’s disappearance, were the first moderately significant words which had ever passed between us. I had felt myself always to be in Mrs. Fyne’s view her husband’s chess-player and nothing else—a convenience—almost an implement.
“I am highly flattered,” I said. “I have always heard that there are no limits to feminine intuition; and now I am half inclined to believe it is so. But still I fail to see in what way my sagacity, practical or otherwise, can be of any service to Mrs. Fyne. One man’s sagacity is very much like any other man’s sagacity. And with you at hand—”
Fyne, manifestly not attending to what I was saying, directed straight at me his worried solemn eyes and struck in: