"T-t-t. It would have saved a day," she said, "if he'd sent this direct to you instead of to Miss Ranger. Why couldn't he when he knew we were so rushed?"
"Why, indeed?" he thought.
"There must have been more corrections," he said.
"She can't have typed them in the time," said Gertrude. She was examining the inner cover. "Besides, she has sent it on unopened."
"Excellent Miss Ranger!"
He said it with a certain levity. But even as he said it his brain accepted the inference she forced on it. If Tanqueray had not sent his manuscript to Camden Town for corrections, he had sent it there for another reason. The parcel was registered. There was no letter inside it.
Brodrick's hand trembled as he turned over the pages of the manuscript. Gertrude's eyes were fixed upon its trembling.
A few savage ink-scratches in Tanqueray's handwriting told where Miss Ranger had blundered; otherwise the manuscript was clean. Tanqueray had at last satisfied his passion for perfection.
All this Brodrick's brain took in while his eyes, feverish and intent, searched the blank spaces of the manuscript. He knew what he was looking for. It would be there, on the wide margin left for her, that he would find the evidence that his wife and Tanqueray were together. He knew the signs of her. Not a manuscript of Tanqueray's, not one of his last great books, but bore them, the queer, delicate, nervous pencil-markings that Tanqueray, with all his furious erasures, left untouched. Sometimes (Brodrick had noticed) he would enclose them in a sort of holy circle of red ink, to show that they were not for incorporation in the text. But it was not in him to destroy a word that she had written.
But he could find no trace of her. He merely made out some humble queryings of Miss Ranger, automatically erased.