“Are you willing to play—” he began.
“I feel as if I could never play again,” interrupted Milton. “You’d hardly believe the amount of blotting-paper I’ve used today. It must have been a lunatic, Dick, old man.”
When Milton called Trevor “Dick”, it was a sign that he was moved. When he called him “Dick, old man”, it gave evidence of an internal upheaval without parallel.
“Why, who else but a lunatic would get up in the night to wreck another chap’s study? All this was done between eleven last night and seven this morning. I turned in at eleven, and when I came down here again at seven the place was a wreck. It must have been a lunatic.”
“How do you account for the printed card from the League?”
Milton murmured something about madmen’s cunning and diverting suspicion, and relapsed into silence. Trevor seized the opportunity to make the proposal he had come to make, that Donaldson’s v. Seymour’s should be played on the following Wednesday.
Milton agreed listlessly.
“Just where you’re standing,” he said, “I found a photograph of Sir Henry Irving so slashed about that I thought at first it was Huntley Wright in San Toy.”
“Start at two-thirty sharp,” said Trevor.
“I had seventeen of Edna May,” continued the stricken Seymourite, monotonously. “In various attitudes. All destroyed.”