It was years, years, years since he had last tried to make an unslept-in bed look as if it had been slept in.
He told himself fretfully that it was odd how unwilling he felt to go over in his own mind the amazing story told him by Sir Angus Kinross. He had thought of nothing else on his long journey from London, but since he had arrived at the Abbey, since he had seen Oliver, he could not bear to think over the details of the sinister story. He forced himself to glance at them, as it were obliquely, for a moment. Yes, he could quite see what Sir Angus meant! Oliver certainly had a sporting chance, backed with the power of commanding the best legal advice and the highest talent at the Bar, coupled with the kind of sympathy which is aroused, even in phlegmatic England, by what the French call a crime passionel.
Once more Lord St. Amant took up the little faded red leather-bound volume, but he had hardly pushed aside the green ribbon which marked his place in it, when there struck on his ears the metallic sound of an alarum clock—one which he judged to have been carefully muffled and deadened, yet which must be quite sufficiently audible to fulfil its purpose of awakening any sleeper in the room where it happened to be.
Now, on hearing that sound, Lord St. Amant was exceedingly surprised, for, as far as he knew, only one other room was occupied on this side of the corridor. That room was that which his late wife had chosen in preference to the one which had been his mother's, and by an odd whim he had assigned it to Laura Pavely.
He turned slightly round in his chair, and glanced at the travelling clock which was on his dressing-table.
It was half-past five.
Why should Laura, or any one else in that great house for the matter of that, wish to be awakened on a winter's morning at such an hour?
While he was thinking this over, he heard the sound of a key turning quietly in a lock, and then there came that of the slow opening of a door on to the corridor.
He stood up, uncertain what to do, and feeling his nerves taut.