II.
Mr. Tamlyn might be clever in medicine; he certainly was not in diplomacy. Dr. Knox had particularly impressed upon him the desirability of keeping their suspicion a secret for the present, even from Madame St. Vincent; yet the first use old Tamlyn made of his liberty was to disclose it to her.
Tossed about in the conflict of doubts and suspicions that kept arising in his mind, Mr. Tamlyn, from the night I have just told you of, was more uneasy than a fish out of water, his opinion constantly vacillating. “You must be mistaken, Arnold; I feel sure there’s nothing wrong going on,” he would say to his junior partner one minute; and, the next minute, decide that it was going on, and that its perpetrator must be Lettice Lane.
The uneasiness took him abroad earlier than he would otherwise have gone. A slight access of fever attacked him the day after the subject had been broached—which fever he had no doubt worried himself into. In the ordinary course of things he would have stayed at home for a week after that: but he now went out on the third day.
“I will walk,” he decided, looking up at the sunshine. “It will do me good. What lovely weather we are having.”
Betaking himself through the streets to the London Road, he reached Jenkins House. The door stood open; and the doctor, almost as much at home in the house as Lady Jenkins herself, walked in without knocking.
The dining-room, where they mostly sat in the morning, was empty; the drawing-room was empty; and Mr. Tamlyn went on to a third room, that opened to the garden at the back with glass-doors.
“Any one here? or is the house gone a-maying?” cried the surgeon as he entered and came suddenly upon a group of three people, all upon their knees before a pile of old music—Madame St. Vincent, Mina Knox, and Captain Collinson. Two of them got up, laughing. Mina remained where she was.
“We are searching for a manuscript song that is missing,” explained madame, as she gave her hand to the doctor. “Mina feels sure she left it here; but I do not remember to have seen it.”
“It was not mine,” added Mina, looking round at the doctor in her pretty, gentle way. “Caroline Parker lent it to me, and she has sent for it twice.”