“Oh, you must not go,” she said, with a look of terror coming into her eyes.
Allery laughed. “I dare say we can manage another day or two,” he said.
When Sanders heard that Collins was going the next day, he was both relieved and angry.
“Just my luck,” he thought, “if I had kept quiet, I need not have gone myself.”
Collins paced his room restlessly. Things were taking shape in his mind. Something was going on which his keen intellect could not explain, but which gave rise to wild conjecture.
He was fully dressed, but had a pair of slippers on. He would know the truth that night somehow.
The wind had got up, and was howling round the old house, making the timbers creak and the windows shake, till it died down to a moaning sound.
Several times he went carefully on to the landing and listened.
It was an ideal night for ghosts to walk.
He would piece the puzzle together. There was Jackson, the lunatic. He knew he was not the murderer, though the police would certainly make out a case against him. Very well. Then there was the strange disappearance of Lewis, on which Sinclair was basing a case until his official position compelled silence.