“Why?”
“You can search me. But far’s I remember, it was to get rid of it—and that seems a likely reason. I think Hugh said it wouldn’t be needed again. Helen is ‘Bransby’s’—no one else could make any trouble—and something had been fixed up—all hunky-dorey and everything.”
“Was—was she willing—willing it should be burned?”
“She was not. But Hugh had his way. Men do in this upside-down, inside-out old country. But I bet you a gooseberry to a guinea Horace Latham won’t—not so you’d notice it.”
“I decline the wager,” Pryde told her. “Go on.”
“Well, you—you were feverish, and fancied all sorts of things that time—when the paper was found. Thought you saw things.”
“I saw Uncle Dick, if that’s what you mean,” Stephen said quietly. “I know I’ve been very ill—had brain fever, and all that—but I did see Uncle Dick. It was no delusion.”
Angela nodded gravely. “Of course you did. I’ve never doubted it for a moment. Isn’t it perfectly wonderful—oh!—if they’d only let the Spiritualists run this war, we’d have the poor old Kaiser dished in a jiff. But they won’t.”
“No, probably not,” Pryde concurred. “Go on.”
“I am going on—as fast as I can. Well, you sailed out of the library, the night you fell ill, and went up to your room, and rammed some things in a bag—Horace followed you up and found you doing it. He saw you were queer, and he ordered you to bed, but you just ordered him out of your room and left the house. No one could stop you. I don’t think Hugh or Horace really wanted to: anyway they couldn’t and they didn’t. You piled up here to London. Where you went here or what you did here, I can’t tell you, for nobody knows. But two days after you left Oxshott, I was having tea in my sitting-room at my hotel—I’d come up to hustle my dressmakers—when in you walked. You were as mad as six March hares—and in about five minutes you fell down with a fit.”