“Has come home? She has not come home, Mr. Cameron. There was a condition we felt forced to make, and she refused to agree to it. Perhaps we were wrong. I—”
Willy Cameron got up.
“Was that to-day?” he asked.
“No.”
“But she was coming home to-day. She was to leave there this afternoon.”
“How do you know that?”
“Denslow saw her there this afternoon. She agreed to leave at once. He had told her of the bombs, and of other things. She hadn't understood before, and she was horrified. It is just possible Doyle wouldn't let her go.”
“But—that's ridiculous. She can't be a prisoner in my sister's house.”
“Will you telephone and find out if she is there?” Howard went to the telephone at once. It seemed to Willy Cameron that he stood there for uncounted years, and as though, through all that eternity of waiting, he knew what the answer would be. And that he knew, too, what that answer meant, where she had gone, what she had done. If only she had come to him. If only she had come to him. He would have saved her from herself. He—
“She is not there,” Howard Cardew said, in a voice from which all life had gone. “She left this afternoon, at four o'clock. Of course she has friends. Or she may have gone to a hotel. We had managed to make it practically impossible for her to come home.”