His meaning was clear enough then.
"Jim!"
His name came from his mother and sister in practically the same instant.
"It's no good you two looking at me like that! there's no getting away from the truth!--look at this!" He pointed to a staring headline which ran across two columns of the paper which he held in front of them: "Where Is Dorothy Gilbert?" "That's a nice thing for me to find glaring at me when I buy an evening paper to look at the cricket! I never felt anything like what I felt when I saw that! Yes, where is she? I can tell you this, there's scarcely a person who was here this afternoon who doesn't know! I expect it's all over the place by now!--at any moment you may have half-a-dozen policemen coming up the drive!"
"Jim, if--if you don't take care what you are saying I'll never speak to you again."
"Now, Frances, it's no use your putting on frills!--you simply don't know what you're talking about. Here's her description--read it for yourself; no one can read it and possibly mistake her. You told me yourself her guardian's name was Emmett; well, he was murdered the night before last--murdered, mind!--read about it yourself! the story's a curdler!--and they say she did it!--I don't say she did it----"
"You'd better not!"
"But they do; and they'll lock her up for it as sure as we are standing here! Anyway you look at it. We've nothing to thank Strathmoira for for getting us mixed up with a thing like this. My hat! I'd like to talk to him!"
"You talk to him! You don't know what you are talking about now! You've not the slightest right to take it for granted that--that my Dorothy has anything to do with the person in the papers."
"Don't talk stuff and nonsense!--it's you who're talking through your hat!--the whole thing's as plain as a pikestaff; do you suppose I don't wish it wasn't?--that I want us to be dragged into a mess of this sort? Oh yes, it's just the sort of thing I would like! Why, it tells you here how Strathmoira came across her; and how it is that she only knew him as Eric Frazer. He's been cruising about in that van of his--you know, mater, that rotten old caravan of his?"