Finally, wishing to ease the strain, Armathwaite glanced at his watch. The time was a few minutes after seven.
"I'm going into the village," he said. "I believe the dinner hour is 7:30, but I may not return till much later, so you might kindly tell Betty that I shall forage for myself when I come in."
"Don't leave me, Bob," came the despairing cry. "I can't bear to be left alone to-night."
"Very well," he said, yielding instantly to that heart-felt appeal. "I'll entrust my business to a deputy. Look for me in ten minutes."
He went out. The two in the room heard the front door close, and followed his firm tread as he strode to the gate. Then Marguérite rose, and flung wide a window, and her sorrow-laden eyes dwelt unseeing on the far horizon. She stood there, motionless, until Whittaker stirred fretfully.
"Look here, Meg," he began, but was promptly stricken into silence again. Starting at the sound of his voice as though she had heard a serpent's hiss, the girl hurried away without a word, obviously making for the solitude of her own apartment.
He lighted another cigarette.
"By gad!" he cackled to himself, apparently extracting amusement from a situation in which the majority of men would have found small cause for humor, "I've stopped those two from billing and cooing, or my name ain't Percy. I can't stomach that big chap, and that's a fact. He's just the sort of fellow a girl might lose her head over, but I've put a spoke in his wheel by bringing ma on the scene. Now I must sit tight, and play naughty little boy in the corner till she arrives. After that, I'll make it my business to shunt pa into some climate better suited for his particular complaint. Maybe I shan't figure so badly in Meg's estimation when she realizes that I did some hard thinking while the other johnny was making eyes at her. I've been looking for some sort of an explosion in this quarter ever since I read of the suicide of Stephen Garth at the Grange, Elmdale. I thought then there was something fishy going on, and I was jolly well not mistaken. If I hadn't been such a dashed fool as to tramp over that confounded moor I'd have been here hours sooner. But all's well that ends well, and this affair shan't slip out of my grip if I can help it."
He had chosen a strange way in which to woo a maid, but there is no accounting for the vagaries of a warped mind, and Percy Whittaker was a true degenerate, one of those physically weak and mentally perverted beings
"In whose cold blood no spark of honor bides."