There she sat down, and, heedless of the people about her, put her chin on her hand and stared before her.
What did her new knowledge portend? What did it lead to? Was Laura associated with this extraordinary, bewildering discovery of hers? But the questions she put to herself remained unanswered. She failed to unravel even a little strand of the tangled skein.
Slowly she got up again, and once more took her place in the queue outside the booking office. It would be folly to lose her train because of this discovery, astounding, illuminating, as it was.
She was so shaken, so excited, that she longed to confide in one of the Haworths, brother or sister, to whose house she was going—but some deep, secretive instinct caused her to refrain from doing that. Still, she was so far unlike herself, that after her arrival the members of the merry party all commented to one another on the change they saw in her.
"She's as pretty as ever," summed up one of them at last, "but somehow she looks different."
All that night Katty lay awake, thinking, thinking—trying to put together a human puzzle of which the pieces would not fit. Gillie Baynton, even if he disliked his brother-in-law, had no motive for doing the awful thing she was now beginning to suspect he had done. She found herself floating about in a chartless sea of conjectures, of suspicions....
She felt better, more in possession of herself, the next morning. Yet she was still oppressed with an awful sense of bewilderment and horror, uncertain, too, as to what use she could make of her new knowledge.
Should she go straight up to town and tell Sir Angus Kinross of what had happened to her yesterday? Somehow she shrank from doing that. He would suspect her of simply trying to snatch the reward. Katty had never been quite at ease with the Commissioner of Police—never quite sure as to what he knew, or did not know, of her past relations to Godfrey Pavely. And yet those relations had been innocent enough, in all conscience! Sometimes Katty, when thinking of those terrible times last January, had felt sorry she had not told Sir Angus the truth as to that joint journey to York. But, having hidden the fact at first, she had been ashamed to confess it later—and now she would have to confess it.
She was still in this anxious, debating-within-herself frame of mind when, at luncheon, something happened which seemed to open a way before her.
Her host, Tony Haworth, was talking of the neighbourhood, and he said, rather ruefully: "Of course a man like that old rascal who calls himself Greville Howard is worse than no good as a neighbour! For one thing he's a regular recluse. He hardly ever goes outside his park gates. I suppose the conscience of a man who's done so many naughty deeds in a good world is apt to make him feel a bit nervous!"