This, then, settled it. Van Hupfeldt was Strauss. David kept the envelope, sipped his milk, and for some time talked with Mrs. Carter about her cows, her fruit, and whether the white calf was to be sold or kept. When it was ten minutes to eight by the big parlor clock he rose to go, said that he hoped to see baby next time, if he might call again, and shook hands. But in going out, from force of habit, he glanced at his watch, and now saw that it was really ten minutes past eight.
“Great goodness!” he exclaimed, “your clock is all wrong!”
“No, sir—” began Mrs. Carter.
David was gone. He had five minutes in which to run a good deal over a mile, and he ran with all his speed; but some distance from the station he saw the train steaming out, and pulled up short.
At that moment Van Hupfeldt in the train was thinking: “It has worked well. He is late, and there is no other train till ten—an hour and three quarters. He has only a charwoman. She will not be in the flat at this hour. No one will be there. Will it be my luck that the diary is not under lock and key?”
As a matter of fact, the diary was lying openly on the dining-room table in the flat, caution of that sort being hardly the uppermost quality in David’s character.
David strolled about Pangley, looked into the tiny shop-windows, dined on fruit, wished that he had not been born some new variety of a fool, and found that hour and three quarters as long as a week. Not much given to suspicions of meanness and cunning, it did not even now come into his head that he was where he was by a trick. He blamed only destiny for imposing upon him such penal inactivity in the little town that night when a thousand spurs were urging him to action. But at last ten o’clock came, and when he stepped into the train he asked himself why he had been so impatient, since probably nothing could be done that evening. He reached London before eleven, and drove home weary of himself and of his cares.
It was too late then, he thought, to go hunting after Van Hupfeldt. On the morrow morning he would again try at the Constitutional. Meantime, he lit himself a fire, and sat over it brooding, cudgeling his brains for some plan of action. Then the diary drew him. He would re-read that tragedy throughout. He put out his arm, half-turning from over the fire to get the book.
It was no longer on the table.