“You too, Constance?” Leonard saw in her eyes something that reminded him of his own overpowering interest in the thing. “You too?”
“Take back the book, Leonard.”
“You have read it?”
“I read it over and over again—I have been reading it all the livelong night.”
“And you—you also—feel—with me—the same——” He did not finish the sentence.
“I feel—like you—constrained to go on—why—I cannot tell you. It is not pity, for one cannot feel pity for a man of whom one knows nothing except that he was young and handsome and unfortunate, and that he was an ancestor. It is not desire for revenge—how can one take revenge for a crime when everybody concerned is dead and gone?”
“Except the man who suffered most.”
“Except that old, old man. Well, I cannot understand it. But the fact is so. Like you, I am drawn by ropes to the subject.”
“As for me I can think of nothing else. I am wholly possessed by the story and by the mystery. We will work at it together—if any work is possible.”
They sat down together and they read the book aloud, both making notes. They read parts of it over again. They compared notes. They went to the club together and dined together: they went home and they spent the evening together: they separated with the assurance that everything had been done which could be done, and that they must reluctantly abandon any further investigation.