"I see," said Malling again.
Looking greatly disturbed, Mr. Harding continued:
"I will ask you to do me a very great favor. Although I am obliged to go, I hope you will stay, I entreat you to stay till Monday. The professor is here. You will not be companionless. The servants will do everything to make you comfortable. As to food, wine—everything is provided for. Will you stay? I shall feel more at ease in going if I know my departure has not shortened your visit."
"It is very good of you," Malling replied. "I'll accept your kind offer.
To tell the truth, I'm in no hurry to leave the Tankerton air."
"Thank you," said the rector, almost with fervor. "Thank you."
So, the next morning, Mr. Harding went away in the hired motor, and
Malling found himself alone in the red doll's house.
He was not sorry. The rector's revelation on the previous night had well repaid him for his journey; then the air of Tankerton really rejoiced him; and he would have speech of the professor.
"I shall lay it before Stepton," he had said to Mr. Harding the previous night, after they had parted from the professor.
And he had spoken with authority. Mr. Harding's confidence, his self-abasement, and his almost despairing appeal, had surely given Malling certain rights. He intended to use them to the full. The rector's abrupt relapse into reserve, his pitiful return to subterfuge, after the receipt of that hypnotizing telegram, had not, in Malling's view, abrogated those rights.
When the motor disappeared, he strolled across the grass with a towel and had a dip in the brown sea, going in off the long shoal that the Whitstable and Tankerton folk call "the Street." Then he set out to find the professor.