"I also remembered Billson--luckily. I had been visiting a friend when I saw, outside a tavern door, a motor car, with a chauffeur standing by it whom I seemed to recognise. For a second I hesitated; then I had it; it was Billson, Emmett's chauffeur. At the same instant he recognised me and, scrambling into the car, would have been off if I hadn't stopped him. The fellow had been drinking."
"It seemed to me that he always had."
"Like his master."
"The master used to get more horribly drunk than the man."
"Pleasant society for you to be alone in."
"It wasn't--nice."
The word came from her with a little gasp; which, as he noticed it, seemed to increase Arnecliffe's restlessness.
"I couldn't get anything out of him at first. It was only when I made it quite clear that if he didn't tell me what I wanted to know I should hand him over to the nearest policeman that he began to tell me things, for some of which I could have twisted his neck off his shoulders, then and there, only I refrained. Finally, he informed me that his master's address, for at least that night, was 'The Bolton Arms Hotel,' Newcaster. As to whether or not you were in his company he professed ignorance, and, possibly, he did not know. Within half-an-hour I was being borne as fast as an express could carry me to Newcaster. It was latish in the evening when I got there. When I reached 'The Bolton Arms' they told me Mr Emmett was dining. I said to the waiter that my name was Gilbert. I hardly know why; I had a sort of hazy idea that he would come rushing down to see what Gilbert it could possibly be. Then I called the waiter back, and, scribbling 'A messenger from Harry Gilbert' on a scrap of paper, sent him up with that instead. When Emmett came down he was inclined to bluster, but the house was crowded. Many of those who were there I fancy knew him, either by sight or reputation. He was quick enough at appreciating the odds on any given event; he saw that here was a case in which bluster wouldn't pay. He took me upstairs to his private sitting-room; we found it empty. I had a notion that finding it empty was a surprise to him. The dinner-table was laid for two; I had a strong feeling that he had expected to find whoever it was he had been dining with still at table; that the discovery of his, or her, absence came upon him with something of a shock. I asked him with whom he had been dining. He said with his wife. 'Your wife!' I cried. He laughed, and said that he was perhaps a little in front of events in speaking of her as his wife; but that she ought to be his wife; and that, if she behaved herself, before long she should be. She came of a bad stock, he added, and his treatment of her entirely depended on her own behaviour. Knowing that he had been tearing about Europe with you; thinking of what Billson had told me; his suggestiveness, his words, his tone, his manner, these things were pretty hard to bear. Oh, I'll go into a court of justice, and admit that I'd have liked to have taken him by the throat and have choked the life out of him then and there. I asked him where you were. He looked me up and down, evidently inquiring of himself how much I knew, and then said that you were in safe-keeping hundreds of miles from Newcaster."
"But I was there, in the room!"
Mr Arnecliffe stared.