“I wish I could help. But you see it’s so peculiarly and emphatically a situation where I can do nothing.”
“I know it, I know it,” she acquiesced mournfully. “Gee, though, I wish she’d fall in love with you or something like that. I wish she’d take her mind off that Irishman. To think, he got so fresh with me, and then he went and bounced one off Mr. Oxford’s jaw.”
“What?”
“Sure; didn’t you know? He got sort of green-eyed about Oxey. Maybe he had a right to; I don’t know. I mean I don’t know about Oxey; he did seem to be around a lot of the time. Paula wouldn’t look at him, of course. Then Cosgrove hung one on Oxey’s jaw, and we thought we’d seen the last of him. But Oxey shows up here last week smooth as ever—hadn’t given up hope, I guess.”
“I must tidy myself a bit for dinner. I wish I could help you, Lib. You mustn’t worry.”
“I suppose I’m making things out worse than they are.” She took up the Book of Sylvan Armitage. “I’ll plunge into this exciting narrative, and try to make some head or tail out of it.” And just as I was going out of the door, she called with a flash of her usual impudence: “What’s that you’re smuggling under your coat?”
“My shoulders,” I laughed.
“You must have the hump, then,” she rejoined, and when I was at the stair-foot, I heard her cry, “Oh, look what I’ve found!” but I did not return to learn of her discovery.
Nor did I immediately ascend to my room. In truth, one reason why I left the library was that I had heard voices in the portrait-corridor: one tone was Crofts’, the other a strange, high-keyed speech I had never heard before. To learn whose voice this was I had retreated from Lib and her find.
I stole to the front entrance, opened the door with the cat-head knocker, peeped out. A dozen yards away my host was saying good-bye to the red-headed, red-bearded young man I had seen cavorting on the lawn at early day-break. The stranger now wore a blue suit of provincial tailoring and sported a huge yellow flower in his buttonhole. A moment later they parted, Crofts with a wave of the hand, the youth with a respectful salute. The owner of Highglen House then walked around past the library in the direction of the Hall of the Moth.