“Her name is Elsa Terry.”
He did not speak. He leaned forward, staring at her under knitted brows, his eyes as eloquent as the silence that lasted while the Bhutani girl came in and removed the supper table. Even after the girl had gone, for two or three minutes the only sounds were the solemn ticking of a big clock on the mantelpiece, the cracking of a pine-knot in the fire, and a murmur of song from a building fifty yards away.
“You and almost everybody else have always believed Jack Terry and your sister Elsa vanished twenty years ago without trace,” she said at last. “They didn’t.”
“Didn’t they go to the Ahbor country?”
“Yes.”
“You mean they’re alive and you’ve known it all these years?”
“They have been dead nearly twenty years. I learned about it soon afterward. You know now why they went up there?”
“I’ve no new information. Jack Terry was as mad as a March hare—”
“I think not,” Hannah Sanburn answered, her gray eyes staring at the fire. “Jack Terry was the most unselfish man I ever heard of. He adored your sister. She was a spiritual, other-worldly little woman, and that beast Kananda Pal—”
“I blame Jenkins,” said Ommony, grinding his teeth. “Kananda Pal was born into a black-art family and knew no better. Jenkins—”