“It's tremendously interesting,” I said. “But how about a look round the links?”
“Unluckily damp always affects my eldest cousin. I've got to buy her a new bronchitis-kettle. Arthurs broke her old one yesterday.”
We slipped out to the chemist's shop in the town, and he bought a large glittering tin thing whose workings he explained.
“I'm used to this sort of work. I come up here pretty often,” he said. “I've the family throat too.”
“You're a good man,” I said. “A very good man.”
He turned towards me in the evening light among the beeches, and his face was changed to what it might have been a generation before.
“You see,” he said huskily, “there was the youngest—Agnes. Before she fell ill, you know. But she didn't like leaving her sisters. Never would.” He hurried on with his odd-shaped load and left me among the ruins of my black theories. The man with that face had done Agnes Moultrie no wrong.
We never played our game. I was waked between two and three in the morning from my hygienic bed by Baxter in an ulster over orange and white pyjamas, which I should never have suspected from his character.
“My cousin has had some sort of a seizure,” he said. “Will you come? I don't want to wake the doctor. Don't want to make a scandal. Quick!”