“Don’t trouble about me, my dear,” said Mrs. Garside. “This good gentleman’s visit is quite a godsend. We see so little company, and get so very mopey sometimes, that the incident of this afternoon comes quite as a pleasant change, and will serve us to talk about for many a day to come.”
So Mr. Drayton, coughing deferentially behind his hand, did just take a cursory glance round the little chintz-furnished room. “Not such a fool as to expect to find him there,” he said to himself as he bowed himself out again.
Then Edith made him a haughty little curtsey, and politely shut him out, as though she had done with him for ever and a day.
“I don’t like that man’s look,” whispered Mrs. Garside as soon as the door was closed.
“Nor I,” answered Edith. “I know by his eyes that he is brimful of suspicion; and yet I cannot believe that he is acting on any positive information.” Her assumption of indifference had vanished utterly. She was the loving, anxious, heart-wrung wife again.
She sank on her knees and rested her head for a moment on Mrs. Garside’s knee. The killing anxiety of the last few weeks was beginning to tell upon her in despite of herself. But next moment she was on her feet again, and, gliding across the floor, she crouched down and glued her ear to the keyhole.
“They are in the breakfast-room,” she whispered. And then in a little while: “Now they are in the kitchen.” A few minutes later came the ominous words: “And now they are going upstairs!”
Pale and terror-stricken the two ladies waited, every minute seeming an hour, while the heavy footsteps overhead went tramping with slow, methodical precision from room to room. So long as they kept out of the fatal dressing-room it did not matter, but that was the very place, or so it seemed to Edith, where they lingered longest of all. “Will they never come out of that room?” she kept on asking herself with agonized earnestness. And then her very heart would seem to stand still with the intensity of her listening. The slow seconds measured themselves accurately by the clock on the chimney-piece, but still no sound reached her to indicate that any discovery had been made; and at length, with intense relief and thankfulness, she heard the heavy footsteps come tramping downstairs.
The footsteps passed slowly into the dining-room, and then Edith could hear the low muttering of two or three voices, as though the superintendent and his men were deep in consultation.
“Surely the worst is over,” said Mrs. Garside. “A few minutes more, and they will be gone.”