The remaining hours of second watch dragged a little but passed quietly, and promptly at eight o’clock I wrapped myself in my blue, scarlet-lined cape, adjusted the wrinkled folds of the detestable Bishop collar, and let myself out the south door. The path was still wet, the trees and shrubbery were veiled in heavy mist, and the whole world very sombre and desolate.
At the bridge I came upon Jim Gainsay. He was sitting disconsolately on a log a little aside from the path, staring at a toad hopping across his feet and apparently lost in his own morose thoughts. I don’t think he had slept for he looked haggard and cold and must have been smoking steadily for hours, for there was a little white circle of cigarette ends around him.
“Young man,” I said with some acerbity, “don’t you know that cigarettes are coffin nails and you are making yourself subject to indigestion, nervous disorders, tuberculosis and asthma?”
He rose grudgingly and surveyed me without enthusiasm.
“To say nothing of measles and hay fever,” he said dourly. “Say, Miss Keate, is there any chance of seeing—her?”
I did not ask whom.
“I don’t know. Have you not seen her lately?”
He glanced at me suspiciously, then motioned to a seat on the log and I found myself seated none too comfortably, with the moisture of a tree dripping down and completing the demoralization of my collar, and beside me a man whom I suspected of theft and—theft, to say the least.
“That was why I was in the hospital last night about dinner time,” he said companionably. “I haven’t seen her for days and days. She is too damn’ devoted to duty.”
“Miss Day is a nice girl,” I said uncertainly.