Every day Lingard spent about an hour with his invalid host, and Wantele was aware that those hours had been very pleasant to Richard Maule. The Greek Room had become a place where they all, with the exception of Athena, had fled now and again as if into sanctuary. There Jane, so Wantele had soon divined, spent her only peaceful moments, for her host was very dependent on her; when with him, she played chess or read aloud, always doing, in a word, something which perforce distracted her mind from everything but the matter in hand.
But Richard Maule had been very unwell during the last few days; compelled to take each night the opiate which was the one habit—the bad habit—he and his wife had in common. Conversation after half-past nine or ten o'clock, even of the mildest type, excited him, and gave him, even with the aid of a powerful opiate, a restless, bad night. Why then had he put off seeing Dick till ten o'clock?
The young man was in no mood to control himself, to assume the quiet, equable manner he always assumed. The hour just spent with those two,—with Athena and Lingard alone,—had tried his nerves.
Mr. Maule was dressed in the evening clothes he had put on early before saying good-bye to Jane Oglander. It was a little matter, but it surprised Wantele; his cousin, as a rule, was always eager to get into the dressing-gown in which he lived when upstairs.
"I had an odd conversation with Jane this evening——"
Wantele nodded his head. Then it was as he had feared,—she had told Richard.
"——and I wish to talk the matter over with you, Dick." He motioned the younger man to sit down, and there was a long moment of silence between them before he spoke again.
"Jane Oglander has got a very strange notion into her head; and I should like to know if she said anything of it to you. Perhaps"—a slight smile came over his unsmiling lips—"perhaps I ought not to call it Jane Oglander's notion, it is evidently the notion—plot would be the better name—of another person. Do you know anything of it, Dick?" He looked fixedly at Wantele.
"No, Jane said nothing to me—nothing that could be described in the terms you have used, Richard."
Wantele's face was overcast with an expression of anxiety and unease.