The first cup of coffee was followed by a second, which he gulped in scalding mouthfuls, asking at short intervals what the time was and how long he had already stayed away.
"Violet and the nurse are pretty well beat out," he explained; "I want to pack them off for a bit of a rest while I mount guard. And we've got to shift the boy before Sonia comes round...."
"You're not moving him—yet?"
"Only to another room. I—I promised her, you see."
He bade me a hurried good-bye and disappeared upstairs until the middle of the afternoon. George came in after luncheon, put half a dozen breathless enquiries and returned hot-foot to his office. Bertrand had a question in the House, but, as soon as he could get away, he came and demanded a full report.
"You don't gather when the child's to be moved?" he said, when I had done. "I—— This is an extraordinary business, Stornaway. I've lived a devil of a long time and I've done some pretty odd things and mixed with some pretty curious people and all that sort of thing, but I'm hanged if I've ever done anything like this before. What are we all up to? I feel I've been stampeded."
"Well, neither of us is doing anything very active," I pointed out, looking at my cigar and book.
"We're countenancing it. If you sat by and watched a drunken man making pipe-lights out of five-pound notes.... What have they decided to do? I don't understand them; I can't keep pace with them."
In so far as I had been admitted to O'Rane's confidence, he had decided to keep the child in London until it could be safely moved and then to send it with its nurse to a cottage which he had mysteriously acquired on the South coast. And there his plans for the time being had ended.