CHAPTER XXVII
'I KNOW THE MAN'
'Another evening of mystery, Elsie?' said Athelstan.
'Yes. Another, and perhaps another. But we are getting to an end. I shall be able to tell you all to-day or to-morrow. The thing is becoming too great for me alone.'
'You shall tell us when you please. Meantime, nothing new has been found out, I believe. Checkley still glares, George tells me. But the opinion of the clerks seems on the whole more favourable, he believes, than it was. Of that, however, he is not perhaps a good judge.'
'They shall all be turned out,' cried Elsie. 'How dare they so much as to discuss——'
'My sister, it is a very remarkable thing, and a thing little understood, but it is a true thing. People, people—clerks and le Service generally—are distinctly a branch of the great human tribe. They are anthropoid. Therefore, they are curious and prying and suspicious. They have our own faults, my dear.'
All day Elsie felt drawn as with ropes to Mr. Dering's office. Was it possible that after that long evening among the lessons of Poverty Lane he should remember nothing? How was she to get at him—how was she to make him understand or believe what he had done? Could she make the sane man remember the actions and words of the insane man? Could she make the insane man do something which would absolutely identify him with the sane man? She could always array her witnesses: but she wanted more: she wanted to bring Mr. Dering himself to understand that he was Mr. Edmund Gray.
She made an excuse for calling upon him. It was in the afternoon, about four, that she called. She found him looking aged, his face lined, his cheek pale, his eyes anxious.