“Don’t you make too sure of that,” said Duffham. “You’ve never felt quite sure about that death of your husband, up at Dales, have you? Thought there was something queer about it—eh?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have thought it.”
“Well, some of us have been looking into it a little. And we find—in short, we are not at all sure that—that Frank did die.”
“Oh!”—her hands lifting themselves in agitation—“what is it, sir? You have come to disclose to me that my husband was murdered.”
“The contrariness of woman!” exclaimed Duffham, giving the floor a thump with his cane. “Why, Mrs. Frank Radcliffe, I told you as plainly as I could speak, that it was good news I brought. So good, that I hardly thought you could bear it with equanimity. Your husband was not murdered.”
Poor Annet never answered a word to this. She only gazed at him.
“And our opinion is that Frank did not die at all; at Dale’s, or elsewhere. Some of us think he is alive still, and—now don’t you drop down in a heap.”
“Please go on,” she breathed, turning whiter than her own cap. “I—shall not drop down.”
“We have reason to think it, Mrs. Frank. To think that he is alive, and well, and as sane in mind as you’d wish him to be. We believe it, ma’am; we all but know it.”
She let her head fall back in the chair. “You, I feel sure, would not tell me this unless you had good grounds for it, Mr. Duffham. Oh, if it may but be so! But—then—what of those cries that we heard?” she added, recollecting them. “I am sure they were his.”