“But, my dear Harley, why should you want to leave the house secretly at night?”
Paul Harley’s cigarette glowed in the dark, then:
“My original object,” he replied, “was to endeavour to learn if any one were really watching the place. For instance, I wanted to see if all lights were out at the Guest House.”
“And were they?” I asked, eagerly.
“They were. Secondly,” he continued, “I wanted to convince myself that there were no nocturnal prowlers from within or without.”
“What do you mean by within or without?”
“Listen, Knox.” He bent toward me in the dark, grasping my shoulder firmly. “One window in Cray’s Folly was lighted up.”
“At what hour?”
“The light is there yet.”
That he was about to make some strange revelation I divined. I detected the fact, too, that he believed this revelation would be unpleasant to me; and in this I found an explanation of his earlier behaviour. He had seemed distraught and ill at ease when he had joined Madame de Stämer, Miss Beverley, and myself in the drawing room. I could only suppose that this and the abrupt parting with me outside my door had been due to his holding a theory which he had proposed to put to the test before confiding it to me. I remember that I spoke very slowly as I asked him the question: