“To-day I have been down to the place. I have visited the wood where the thing happened: I found again that old man of the churchyard, who paid you an undeserved compliment.” Constance blushed, but not much. “I made him tell me all he remembered: it was not much, but it sounded like the unexpected confirmation of some old document.”
“And have you come to any conclusion yet? Have you formed any theory?”
“None that will hold water. I don’t know what is going to happen over that business, but I must go on—I must go on.”
She laid a hand upon his arm.
“If you must go on, let me go with you. It is my murder as well as yours. Lend me the book.”
She carried it off to her own rooms, and that night another incubus sat upon another sleeping person and murdered rest.
CHAPTER XIII
A COMPROMISE
“Come to get another speech, Fred?” Christopher looked up cheerily from the work before him. The sweet spring season, when the big dinners are going on, is his time of harvest, and after June he can send his sheaves of golden grain to the Bank. It promised to be a busy and a prosperous season. “Come for another speech, old man?” he repeated. “I’m doing a humorous one on Literature, but I can make room for you.”
“Hang your speeches!” Fred sat down on the table. “You might offer a man a drink.” He spoke as one oppressed with a sense of injustice.
“Seem out of sorts, Fred. What’s gone wrong? Colonial Enterprise? The great concern which interests all Lombard Street hitched up somehow?” He asked with the exasperating grin of the doubter. But he opened a cupboard and produced a bottle, a glass, and two or three sodas. “Well, old man, there’s your drink.”