It is no good asking whether Joan and Chummy were engaged. What is a young woman's engagement nowadays? No doubt Joan's father had in his day ceremoniously "waited upon" her maternal grandfather-elect and had "had the honor" and so on, but Miss Joan always reminded me of the private with the field-marshal's baton—she seemed to have come into the world with a will of her own, a latch-key and her marriage-lines all potentially complete. I remember she called an engagement an "understanding." If by that word she meant what the Psalmist meant, she certainly made haste with all her heart to get it.
Of course, Philip had sooner or later discovered what was going on under his abused roof, and now knew all there was to be known about it. And it must have occurred to him also that, with letters numbered "1," "2" and "3" flying backwards and forwards all the time, any interruption of more than a day or two would set Joan, away in Santon, Yorks, anxiously wondering what was the matter.
You are now to see how far I was right in this.
VII
The lights he had switched on were a couple of standard lamps only, that worked from plugs in the wall. Both had mignonette-colored shades, and while one shade stood a-tilt near the syphon and glasses, the other threw a soft light on Philip's little escritoire. As he sat the light crossed his breast only, leaving his face in a half-transparent obscurity. A few yards away the entrance to the studio made a dead black oblong, so completely without trace of the evening light that must still be lingering in the world outside that I judged that the dark-blue roof-blinds were still drawn.
I suppose it was these roof-blinds, and Philip's apparent disinclination to have them touched, that brought my surmises with regard to Monty Rooke into my mind again. And somehow, back again under the roof where the tragedy had happened, these surmises seemed to have grown a little more threatening. Why this alteration of values should take place in me I didn't know, but there it undeniably was, hovering (so to speak) in the spaces above the unlighted chandelier, approaching as it were to the very edge of the penumbra that crossed our host's breast, and accumulated as in some dark power-house beyond the threshold of the black studio doorway. And as this feeling grew on me lesser feelings seemed by comparison to grow less still. My hastily-seized-on explanation with regard to Joan seemed all at once insufficient. A shock of some kind she would naturally receive; that was unavoidable in any event; but what would be simpler than to write to her immediately, to tell her what had been discovered since her departure, to promise to send her daily bulletins, and to warn her that for the present, in the absence of letters, these must suffice?
I didn't know to what extent I was supposed to be privy to the Chummy-Smith-Joan-Merrow love affair, but in the circumstances I did not let that trouble me. I just said what I thought. "She'll have to be told some time or other," I finished by saying.
But for some reason or other he waved my words aside.
"Wouldn't do at all." His voice came from within the shade of the mignonette-colored lamp. "Must think of something better than that."